This Global Strategy and Booster Program is a significant upgrade of the World Bank's support for malaria control, with emphasis on closing the gap between knowing and doing. It provides the basis for a new Booster Program for Malaria Control, which is designed to accelerate malaria control and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, box 1).
The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 1.1 million deaths per year from malaria, mostly among children less than 5 years old (WHO 2002). The disease is preventable and curable with available technologies. However, in the absence of strong and sustained malaria control efforts, coverage with effective interventions is low, particularly among the poor. At least 85 percent of deaths from malaria occur in Africa, 8 percent in Southeast Asia, 5 percent in the Eastern Mediterranean region, 1 percent in the Western Pacific, and 0.1 percent in the Americas (Arrow, Panosian and Gelband 2004). Globally, there are more than 500 million cases of malaria per year; a recent study put the number of cases from a particularly severe form of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, at 515 million in 2002 alone (Snow et al. 2005).