Climate change, population growth major threats as malaria fight stalls

The fight against malaria has stalled after two decades of progress, with climate change and population growth among factors threatening a resurgence of the potentially fatal disease, campaigners said on Tuesday.

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Insufficient funding for increasingly costly prevention programmes risked efforts against the mosquito-borne illness at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, they said.

The impact would be most keenly felt in Africa which accounts for 95 percent of cases of the disease that claimed 590,000 deaths worldwide in 2023, the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) and Malaria No More UK said in a new report. Several African countries had reported upsurges in cases between January and June 2025 after heavy rainfalls, they said.

Malaria mortality has halved over the past two decades, said the report released ahead of a November 21 meeting in South Africa to secure contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which covers 59 percent of malaria spending.

“Insufficient funding, however, has caused malaria progress to stall,” it said.