Health A-Z

Healthy eating costs an extra $1.50 per day: study

That healthy foods cost more has become conventional wisdom, but a new study is the most thorough yet in calculating how much more: about a dollar and a half.

“Before now, we’ve seen studies looking at prices of one or a few foods or diets, in one city and from one store,” said Mayuree Rao. “And the results have been mixed, with some studies finding that the healthier options cost more and some studies finding they don’t.”

Rao is a junior research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and a medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She led the study that was published in BMJ Open.

The research team identified 27 previous studies from 10 countries that met their inclusion criteria and reviewed each of them. Fourteen studies were conducted in the U.S, two in Canada, six in Europe and five in other countries including South Africa, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil.

Twelve of the studies were market surveys that evaluated the prices of anywhere from two to 133 foods each and included up to 1,230 stores.

Fifteen studies were dietary surveys that ranged from 30 participants to more than 78,000.

The researchers compared the costs of the healthiest eating patterns with the least healthful and found that the healthiest diets cost on average $1.47 more per day based on actual food intake, or about $1.54 more per day for every 2,000 calories consumed.

The studies in the review used various definitions of “healthy” – including comparing the amount of fat or sugar in similar products, or comparing whole grain versus refined carbohydrate versions, or looking at total fruit and vegetable intake or overall calories.

But all the findings were consistent across current standards for healthy eating, such as the Mediterranean diet, or Harvard’s Alternative Healthy Eating Index.

The researchers also compared price differences in food groups – healthier meats and proteins had the largest difference between healthy and unhealthy choices – about 29 cents more per serving.

It’s important to consider what an extra $1.50 per day can mean for individual as well as family budgets, according to Rao.

“It translates to about $550 more per year for one person, and that could be a real barrier to healthier eating. We need better policies to help offset these costs,” she said.

“On the other hand, $1.50 is about the price of a cup of coffee – just a drop in the bucket when you consider the billions of dollars spent every year on diet-related chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. When you look at the long-term health impact, the extra $1.50 is a good investment,” she said.

Rao says that determining why healthier diets are more expensive is certainly an interesting topic for more investigation.

“Other research from our group has observed that over the past century, the U.S. has developed a complex system of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing that favors a lower cost of highly processed foods,” Rao said. “We just don’t have the same system to support healthier foods like fruits and vegetables.”

That extra daily cost can be a burden for low-income families said Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. He was not involved in the new research, but some of his work was included in the review.

“An additional $1.50 represents a 15-25 percent increase for the average American,” Drewnowski said. “It does not sound like much but low-income families spend about $6 on food. So here, $1.50 represents a 25 percent increase.”

“Also remember that $1.50 per person per day represents $540 per year, or $2,200 for a family of four. When you multiply by 200 million American adults (I am being conservative here), you get a total cost of 108 billion dollars – more than the entire USDA budget for food assistance,” he told Reuters Health in an email.

Drewnowski points out that dollar figure is about the same as the estimated cost of obesity to society, said to be on the order of $100 billion per year.

“So – are we asking consumers to spend another 108 billion in order to eat healthier? I wish they would, but I am not optimistic. At the very least we need a recognition that nutrition education needs to be accompanied by some economic measures,” he said.

Drewnowski thinks the main problem is that empty calories have become extremely cheap.

“Sugar, refined cereals and vegetable oils have made the food supply relatively inexpensive. However, those foods provide calories and (sometimes) few nutrients – so that obesity and hidden hunger can coexist,” he said.

“Subsidizing healthy foods and taxing unhealthy foods are evidence-based ways to address the price imbalance and nudge people towards a healthier diet. These are strategies that policymakers in many countries should be looking at,” Rao said.

Source: updated news

Flu vaccine prevented 6.6 million illnesses last year, says CDC

According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), flu vaccines prevented 6.6 million illnesses and 79,000 hospitalizations last year. Health officials urge people to get flu shots to prepare for upcoming “peak” months of this flu season.

Federal health officials are urging all Americans six months and older to get the flu vaccine in preparation for this year’s flu season, after evidence showed that the vaccine protected more people against the disease last year.

Last year’s flu season was more severe than recent seasons, according to findings by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The season started earlier than expected, causing 381,000 people to become hospitalized and 169 children to die from the flu last year.

There is good news, however. Although the virus impacted many lives, the flu vaccine also prevented millions more from becoming ill.
“We estimate that during last year’s flu season, flu vaccination prevented 6.6 million people from getting sick with flu, 3.2 million from going to see a doctor and at least 79,000 hospitalizations,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden said in a CNN article Thursday, calling the findings on the flu vaccine and protection “eye-opening”

Although Friden explained the importance of getting vaccinated, less than half of Americans — 40 percent—have gotten the flu shot this year. To put the findings by health officials into perspective, if 70 percent of Americans had gotten the flu vaccine last year, another 4.4 million cases of flu and 30,000 hospitalizations would have been prevented. As the flu season begins to pick up across the country, especially in some Southeastern states, Frieden and other health officials now use the data to urge people to get vaccinated.

“We know that it will increase in the coming weeks and months, but we cannot predict where and when and how severe this year’s flu season will be,” Frieden stated in an article for WebMD. “What we can predict is that the best way you can protect yourself against flu is to get a flu vaccine. “It’s not too late to get vaccinated.

CDC’s Center for Global Health Director Dr. Anne Schuchat also spoke of the importance of getting vaccinated as soon as possible, noting that flu season typically peaks between January and March. She also explained that it was particularly important for children to get the flu shot.

“Already, three children have died this year from the flu,” Shuchat said in an article for CNN. “We hate to see anyone die from the flu, but particularly children. I really urge parents to make sure their children are vaccinated.”

Source: digital journal

Cancer deaths rise to 8.2 million, breast cancer sharply up

The global death toll from cancer rose to 8.2 million in 2012 with sharp rises in breast cancer as the disease tightened its grip in developing nations struggling to treat an illness driven by Western lifestyles.

Cancer deaths were up 8 percent from 7.6 million in a previous survey in 2008 and breast cancer killed 522,000 women last year, up 14 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

“Breast cancer is also a leading cause of cancer death in the less developed countries of the world,” said David Forman, head of IARC’s Section of Cancer Information, the group that compiles the global cancer data.

He said this was “partly because a shift in lifestyles is causing an increase in incidence, and partly because clinical advances to combat the disease are not reaching women living in these regions.”

An estimated 14.1 million people developed cancer in 2012, up from 12.7 million in 2008. And 1.7 million women were newly diagnosed with breast cancer last year, up by more than 20 percent from 2008.

IARC’s report, called GLOBOCAN 2012, gives the most up-to-date estimates for 28 different types of cancer in 184 countries and offers an overview of the global cancer burden.

It found that the most commonly diagnosed cancers worldwide in men and women combined were lung, breast and colorectal cancers. The most common causes of cancer death were lung, liver and stomach cancers.

SUBSTANTIVE INCREASE

Projecting forward, IARC experts said they expected “a substantive increase” in cancer cases worldwide, with annual new cases predicted to rise to 19.3 million by 2025 as the global population both grows and ages.

Worldwide trends show that in developing countries going through rapid societal and economic change, the shift towards lifestyles more typical of richer industrialized countries leads to a rising burden of cancers linked to reproduction, diet and hormones.

The IARC report said cancer incidence – the number of new cases each year – has been increasing in most regions of the world, but noted what it said were “huge inequalities” between rich and poor countries.

While rates of new cancer cases are still highest in more developed regions, death rates are relatively much higher in less developed countries because people’s tumors are often not detected and diagnosed early enough due to a lack of screening and access to treatment.

“An urgent need in cancer control today is to develop effective and affordable approaches to the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer among women living in less developed countries,” said Christopher Wild, IARC’s director.

He said it was critical to bring rates of disease and death in poorer countries in line with progress made in recent years in treating and curing some cancers on wealthier countries.

One stark example of the inequality is in cervical cancer – which kills hundreds of thousands of women in Africa each year but can be largely avoided with a vaccine or successfully treated if it is picked up early enough with screening.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 34.8 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed per 100,000 women each year, and 22.5 per 100,000 women die from the disease. That compares with 6.6 and 2.5 per 100,000 women respectively in North America.

“These findings bring into sharp focus the need to implement the tools already available for cervical cancer, notably HPV vaccination combined with well organized national programs for screening and treatment,” Wild said.

Source: reuters

Three die suddenly from rare Lyme disease complication

One was found dead in a car that veered off the road. Two others collapsed and died suddenly without warning. All three may have been killed by an infection known for causing long-term misery, but not one usually considered a killer — Lyme disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports Thursday on the cases of three people who literally dropped dead from a heart infection known as Lyme carditis. The two men and a woman were young, aged 26 to 38, and had not been treated for Lyme disease.

And no one suspected an infection until an astute pathologist readying heart tissue for a possible transplant noticed something wrong.

The first case was one of those inexplicable deaths, when a young, seemingly healthy person dies suddenly from heart disease.

“In November 2012, a Massachusetts resident was found unresponsive in an automobile after it veered off the road. No evidence of traumatic injury was found,” the CDC team and state department of health investigators write in the report. The driver was dead.

In the second case, a New York state resident had chest pain and collapsed and died at home last July. This patient did have an unusual heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, but no one suspected something else might have been involved.

The same month, a Connecticut resident died suddenly while on an out-of-town visit. “The patient had complained of episodic shortness of breath and anxiety during the 7–10 days before death. The patient lived on a heavily wooded lot and had frequent tick exposure; there was no known history of cardio­vascular disease,” experts wrote in the report, published in the CDC’s weekly report on disease and death.

All three were tissue donors. A pathologist at the Cryolife tissue lab in Kennesaw, Ga. noticed something unusual when he was examining the heart valve from one of the victims as it was being prepared for a transplant. “He noticed the histopathology was similar to what he had seen in Lyme carditis,” said Dr. Joe Forrester, a CDC epidemiologist in Ft. Collins, Colo. who helped write the report.

The Ft. Collins lab checked the blood; the CDC in Atlanta checked the tissue and found the characteristic Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. “We began investigating,” Forrester said.

The Massachusetts victim may have had symptoms of Lyme disease. “Interviews with next-of-kin revealed that the patient had described a nonspecific illness with malaise and muscle and joint pain during the two weeks preceding death. The patient lived alone with a dog that was reported to have ticks frequently,” the report reads.

Forrester said the victim almost certainly did not think anything serious was wrong. “If I had muscle aches and joint pains, I don’t know if I would go to the doctor right away,” Forrester told NBC news.

Only four other deaths from Lyme disease have ever been reported, CDC says — two in Europe and two in the United States. “Pathologists and medical examiners should be aware that Lyme carditis can be a cause of sudden cardiac death,” the agency advises.

Lyme disease is common, and this deadly complication remains very unusual. “We believe it’s rare. We are trying to find out how rare,” Forrester said.

CDC says while 30,000 Lyme cases are reported a year, it’s probably much more common than that — perhaps as high as 300,000 cases a year.

It’s most common in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

It’s not clear what the message for the general public might be – people are already cautioned to avoid being bitten by ticks, especially in areas known to have high rates of Lyme disease. Lyme is caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and antibiotics usually clear it up. And Forrester says only 1 percent of people infected with Lyme disease get carditis.

There is not a vaccine against Lyme, so CDC recommends using insect repellants — those containing DEET are best — and wearing long sleeves, pants and socks when in wooded areas where ticks might be found.

Source: nbc news

98, 000 Nigerian Women Die Annually From Firewood Smoke – Health Official

Nigerian women are being discouraged from using firewood. No fewer than 98,000 Nigerian women die annually from smokes inhaled during cooking with firewood, an official of the Federal Ministry of Environment, Bahijjahtu Abubakar, has said.

Ms. Abubakar, who is the National Coordinator, Renewable Energy Programme, told newsmen at the official launch of RUWES and the 4th Annual Nigeria Renewable Energy Day in Abuja on Wednesday.

She said the death from the sector contributed to 10 per cent of global annual death, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) study.

“The WHO says that over 98,000 Nigerian women die annually from the use of firewood. “If a woman cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is equivalent to smoking between three and 20 packets of cigarette a day.

“The death from this sector contributes to 10 per cent of global annual death and it is bigger than tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS and malaria combined, and it is only killing women,” the official said.

The coordinator said there was so much energy poverty in Nigeria, especially in the rural areas in a country that was blessed with abundant energy resources.
She said there was no way Nigeria would be contributing 10 per cent to global annual death without addressing it. According to her, the ministry has just launched a Rural Women Energy Security (RUWES) programme to prevent the trend and to create awareness on the dangers of using dirty energy.

Ms. Abubakar said the ministry had registered over 1.6 million Nigerians under the RUWES programme. She, however, said the ministry had been harnessing renewable energy to provide clean cooking energy for the rural women.

“Harnessing renewable energy is a tool to mitigate the impact of climate change tool, to address poverty and it is about economic empowerment and also contribution to the environment.

“So, we are looking at the lighting solution, heating and cooking solution,” she said. The coordinator said the ministry had been reaching out to women-based organisations through RUWES.

“We are reaching out to faith-based organisations such as the Federation of Moslem women and the Catholic Women Organisation.
“We hope through the market women organisation and all the professionals that are women- based, we are reaching out to every nook and cranny of Nigeria.’’

On the affordability of the cooking stoves provided under RUWES, she said it would be a single digit interest rate for the facilities.
“The women have two years to pay back. All they need is to belong to cooperative and they are given lighting, cooking and heating solution facility to use.

“A woman can get a stove and pay over seven months and we know that the poorest woman will be able to afford it.
The Nigeria Renewable day is “embracing the green movement’’.

Source: premium times

Long-term use of antacids linked to vitamin B12 deficiency

A new study has found that people who took commonly prescribed heartburn and ulcer medications for long term were at higher risk of vitamin B12 deficiency.

Left untreated, vitamin B12 deficiency can increase the risk of dementia, nerve damage, anemia, and other medical complications, some of which may be irreversible. Stomach acid aids in vitamin B12 absorption; suppressing the acids can lead to the health-threatening vitamin deficiency.

Researchers examined the electronic health records (including diagnoses, pharmacy orders, and laboratory results) of 25,956 adult Kaiser Permanente patients diagnosed with vitamin B12 deficiency in Northern California between January 1997 and June 2011, and compared them with 184,199 patients without B12 deficiency during the same time period.

“Patients who took PPI medications for more than two years had a 65 percent increase in their risk of B12 deficiency,” Douglas A. Corley, MD, PhD, a gastroenterologist and research scientist with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, said. “Higher doses also were associated with an increased risk, compared with lower doses. Kaiser Permanente’s electronic health records allowed us to look at what happens in the real world for these commonly used medications.”

Among the 25,956 patients who had vitamin B12 deficiency, 12 percent used PPIs for at least two years, compared with 7.2 percent of the control patients. The impact of taking any daily dosage of H2RA medications was less pronounced but also significant: 4.2 percent of patients with B12 deficiency used these medications versus 3.2 percent of control patients.

The study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Source: health

 

Baby steps to saving lives

 

Each year, one in 10 babies around the world will be born prematurely and over a million of those will die. But could measuring the size of a baby’s feet help save lives?

In the final weeks of pregnancy, the idea of going into early labour might not seem like such a bad thing.

But giving birth prematurely – officially classed as before 37 weeks gestation – can lead to long-term health effects.

Depending on quite how early the baby is born, infants can either be completely unaffected or left with permanent disability and learning difficulties.

The issue of prematurity is particularly pronounced in South Asian and Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for over 80% of the deaths caused by pre-term birth complications.

In rural Tanzania, for example, about one in every 30 premature babies won’t make it past four weeks.

However, most of those lives could be saved with simple advice for mothers.

And that advice, says an international group of researchers, could start with just a footprint.

Foot chart with side rule

The larger foot on the yellow card represents a full term baby’s foot size. If a newborn’s feet are smaller than th

Sizing upe small foot on the card, the baby is probably premature and the advice is to take the baby to hospital immediately. Side rule added for scale.

Most mothers in high-income countries will give birth surrounded by medical equipment or with the support of a highly-skilled midwife.

This means that any problems, such as a low birth-weight or the mother’s waters breaking early, can be dealt with immediately.

In contrast, around 40% of women giving birth in low-income countries will do so without the help of a trained medical professional.

And due to inaccurate dating of pregnancy, many of those women will have no way of telling if their baby is too early or too small.

However, measuring the baby’s footprint could be used as a simple proxy for birth weight.

“There’s this grey area when the baby is between around 2.4kg (5lbs 5oz) and 2.1kg (4lbs 10oz) when the baby is more vulnerable to infection and other issues,” says Dr Joanna Schellenberg of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“But when a baby is born at home, there is no way of weighing them,” she told the BBC.
The BBC’s Tulanana Bohela has been to see the project in action
To help solve the problem, Schellenberg and her colleagues at the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania have implemented a strategy called Mtunze Mtoto Mchanga – which means “protect the newborn baby”.

It includes using a picture of two footprints on a piece of laminated card and a local volunteer placing the baby’s foot against the images.

If the baby has feet smaller than the smallest foot, around 67mm, then the mother is advised to take the baby to hospital immediately. If it measures in between the big and the small image, then the mother is told about the extra care she needs to provide to increase the baby’s chances of survival.

Although the card is fairly accurate for five days after birth, it should be used it to identify small babies in their first two days of life, which is when they’re most at risk of dying without specialist care.

Mariam Ulaya is one of the volunteers at Namayakata shuleni village and visits the women before and after the birth.

“If I’ve measured the child’s footprint and seen that the child is smaller than usual, then I instruct them to carry the child skin-to-skin so that the child can share and feel the mother’s warmth,” says Ulaya.

“I also carry a small doll with me called Opendo. I use the doll to illustrate the proper way to breastfeed the child.”

‘It has helped my child to survive’
Such advice may seem simple but can really be the difference between life and death.

A report by the World Health Organization (WHO) says that of the 15 million premature births globally each year, more than 80% will occur between 32 and 37 weeks’ gestation.

Risks factors for premature birth

There is no clear cause of premature birth and there tend to be many different risk factors involved.
These include infections of the genital and urinary tract, pre-eclampsia, problems with the placenta and gestational diabetes.
Obesity is another major risk factor for premature birth.

Fetal fibronectin is a protein which can be used as a reliable indicator of preterm birth. It normally appears around 22 weeks and then again at the end of pregnancy. If it appears between these dates, early labour often follows.
Research also suggests that low levels of the hormone progesterone in the saliva could also help spot women at risk of sudden premature labour.

Most of these babies will survive if given extra warmth through skin-to-skin contact and very regular breastfeeding to help fight off infection.

In fact, the report states that an estimated 75% of deaths in preterm infants can be prevented in this way – without the cost and emotional upset of intensive care.

Salima Ahmad is 25 and has three children who live with her in Namahyakata dinduma village, Tanzania. Her youngest son, Alhaji, was born prematurely.

“I was a little bit shocked because many premature babies end up dying but I was also happy because I had a live baby,” says Salima.

Although Alhaji was born at the local hospital, Salima was given advice and support by volunteers from Mtunze Mtoto Mchanga about how to care for him once she got home.

“Carrying skin-to-skin was good but difficult in the beginning. But when the volunteer was visiting me and encouraging me, I could see myself managing it slowly. It is good, it has helped my child to survive,” she says.

Salima also feels that understanding more about premature birth helps mothers like herself to deal with it properly.

“It helps a lot for the mother not to be surprised when having a premature birth. It is useful to know in advance as you get good knowledge on how to handle the premature. Myself, I do thank the volunteer who talked about it when I was pregnant and she even taught me how to carry skin to skin.”

Source: BBC

Five reasons why you should eat oranges

Whether you have it as a snack, add it to your dish for a sweet and tangy flavour or just squeeze it to make a glass of fresh juice – oranges are one of the most popular fruits around the world power packed with immense health benefits. A rich source of Vitamin C and packed with antioxidants, flavonoids and dietary fibre this citrus fruit is said to have anti-inflammatory, anti-tumour and anti-oxidant properties.

Here are some of the health benefits for oranges:

Boost immunity: Just one orange supplies 116.2% of the daily value for vitamin C. Vitamin C, is vital for the healthy functioning of the immune system. It also helps prevent colds and recurrent ear infections.

Prevents cancer: Vitamin C, a primary water-soluble antioxidant protects the cells from damages by free radicals reducing risk of cancer. The fibre in oranges can grab cancer-causing chemicals and keep them away from cells of the colon, providing yet another line of protection from colon cancer. Beta-cryptoxanthin, an orange-red carotenoid may significantly lower risk of developing lung cancer.

Lowers cardiovascular disease risk: Folate, also known as vitamin B9, helps lower levels of homocysteine- an amino acid produced by the body – high levels of which can cause hardening and narrowing of the arteries, heart attack, stroke and blood clot formation. The potassium in oranges helps lower blood pressure, protecting against stroke and cardiac arrhythmias; and the vitamin C, carotenoids and flavonoids have been identified as having protective cardiovascular effects. Iron and Vitamin B6 in oranges help in the production of haemoglobin and increase the oxygen carrying capacity.

Prevents stomach ulcers: Oranges are a very good source of fibre which helps keep your stomach and intestines healthy. A diet rich in fibre helps stimulating digestive juices and helps prevent constipation and stomach ulcers.

Great for diabetics: A single orange provides 12.5% of the daily value for fibre and has a high glycaemic index which makes it a good food option for diabetics. Fibre helps to keep blood sugar levels under control. In addition, the natural fruit sugar in oranges, fructose, can help to keep blood sugar levels from rising too high after eating.

Source: zee news

 

Older people may be less tired: Study

Senior citizens reported feeling less tired than younger people, including teenagers, in a new US study.

To the researchers’ surprise, 15- to 24-year-olds – the youngest people in their study – said they felt the most fatigued of all during daily activities. The difference between the two age groups was almost one full point on a scale of 0 to 6, with 6 representing “very tired.”
“It’s a big effect,” Laura Kudrna told Reuters Health. She and her colleague, Paul Dolan, conducted the study at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The link between increasing age and decreasing fatigue held steady when they factored in how much people slept, how many children they had, whether they were employed and their general health.

Additionally, the researchers found people who were more educated and healthier tended to be less tired. Women reported feeling more tired than men. And feelings of fatigue increased with each additional child in the family.

The study of nearly 13,000 Americans is one of very few to investigate tiredness on a large scale, said Kudrna. It was published in the Journals of Gerontology Series B.

“The evidence on this so far is quite mixed, and most studies have either been done in clinical settings or in Europe,” she said.

Source: your health

Malaria control efforts saved 3.3 million since 2000, WHO says

Global efforts to curb malaria have saved the lives of 3.3 million people since 2000, cutting global death rates from the mosquito-borne disease by 45 percent and by half in children under 5, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

WHO said in its World Malaria Report 2013 that expanded prevention and control measures helped produce declines in malaria deaths and illness. Of the 3.3 million lives saved, most were in the 10 countries with the highest malaria burden and among children under age 5, the group most afflicted by the disease.

“Investments in malaria control, mostly since 2007, have paid off tremendously,” said Ray Chambers, the United Nations secretary-general’s special envoy for malaria.

According to the WHO report, child deaths fell to fewer than 500,000 in 2012.

Overall, there were an estimated 207 million cases of malaria in 2012, which caused some 627,000 deaths, according to the report, which includes information from 102 countries with malaria transmission.

The estimated number of malaria cases per 1,000 at-risk individuals – a figure that takes population growth into account – shows a 29 percent drop globally between 2000 and 2012, and a 31 percent drop in Africa.

During the same period, death rates per 1,000 at-risk individuals fell by 45 percent globally and 51 percent in children under age 5.

“This remarkable progress is no cause for complacency: absolute numbers of malaria cases and deaths are not going down as fast as they could,” WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

“The fact that so many people are infected and dying from mosquito bites is one of the greatest tragedies of the 21st century.”

FUNDING CUTS

Malaria is endemic in more than 100 countries worldwide but can be prevented by the use of bed nets and indoor spraying to keep the mosquitoes that carry the disease at bay. The mosquito-borne parasitic disease kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, mainly babies in the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

An estimated 3.4 billion people continue to be at risk for malaria, mostly in Southeast Asia and in Africa where around 80 percent of cases occur.

Chambers said progress against malaria has been threatened by funding cuts in 2011-2012, which translated into a flattening in the curve of the decline. The WHO noted significant drops in delivery of insecticide-treated bed nets in its 2013 report.

But that could begin to ease. Last month, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNICEF, the UK’s Department for International Development and the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative agreed to provide over 200 million nets in the next 12 to 18 months, which will replace 120 million existing bed nets and provide 80 million new ones.

WHO also continues to track emerging parasite resistance to artemisinin, the core component of malaria drugs known as artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs, and mosquito resistance to insecticides.

Four countries in Southeast Asia reported artemisinin resistance in 2013, and 64 countries found evidence of insecticide resistance, suggesting recent gains against malaria are still “fragile,” Dr Robert Newman, director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme, said in a telephone interview.

“The greatest threat to the future isn’t biological, but financial. It’s not having enough money to stay a step ahead,” Newman said.

Source: reuters