Global Malaria Control in the 21st Century: A Historic but Fleeting Opportunity

There is today more attention to and financing for malaria control than at least the past 4 decades. Following the collapse of the global eradication campaign in the early 1970s, malaria control programs around the world dwindled as funding dried up, technical guidance became confused and at times contradictory, and much of the global community seemed ready to accept that malaria was an unavoidable fact of life in tropical regions.¹ Gains that had been made in reducing the burden of the disease in Asia and Latin America eroded, while in sub-Saharan Africa, the already intolerable number of deaths began to increase as the primary means of defense, chloroquine, increasingly failed.²