Malaria kills more than twice as many people each year as previous estimates have imagined, new research shows. According to ABC News, researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation found that about 1.2 million people die of the disease every year.
The higher death toll is most likely due to having access to more reliable data, researchers said. To better understand the state of malaria in the world, authors of the study collected data on malaria deaths for more than two decades. After gathering information from 1980 to 2010, they were able to announce that 1.2 million people died of the disease in 2010—twice as many as were reported by the World Health Organization, which estimated that 650,000 succumbed to malaria last year.
Other assumptions about malaria also proved to be false. For example, it was previously believed that most malaria deaths occur in children under the age of five, while in reality, 42 percent of all malaria deaths are in older children and adults.
These numbers are not entirely a reason to despair, however. Researchers noted that while the death toll is higher, new drug treatments and prevention programs have resulted in a decline in malaria-related deaths that is also higher than was previously believed.
“This runs counter to most assumptions about the disease,” said Dr. Stephen Lim, who worked on the research. “The good news, though, is that even though the overall number of deaths is higher, the trend is sharply downward.”
The data was published in the journal The Lancet.
