Malaria is rare in the US – for now.
"Malaria is a peculiar disease,” says Dr. Michael Adekunle Charles, CEO of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership to End Malaria. “It's a disease that is preventable, that is treatable, that is curable.”
Yet, the travel-related disease strikes more than 200 million people a year. Nearly 600,000 of those infections are fatal.
While malaria was declared largely eradicated in the U.S. decades ago, public health experts warn that federal funding cuts to life-saving programs could bring the fight against malaria back to the U.S.
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More than 2,000 malaria cases are reported annually in the U.S. and most are travel related. But there have been several cases among people who did not travel — and malaria had been transmitted through mosquitoes, according to the CDC. Recent cases in the U.S. included an NFL player who traveled to Nigeria, a country that accounts for a quarter of malaria cases worldwide, and a national guardsman who did not leave the U.S.
Most malaria deaths occur in Africa, where children account for more than 75% of deaths in the region, according to the World Health Organization.
“If a child under five gets malaria, if he or she does not have access to health facilities, if he or she does not have access to treatment, we can see an innocent child die within two or three days,” said Charles.
“Although this is a problem mainly on the African continent, with traveling, with mosquitoes going up and down everywhere, there is still the possibility that if we're not careful and if we don't curtail it at source, it could potentially spread,” he added.
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Malaria prevention largely focuses on mosquito control and antimalarial medicine. Charles says a lag in funding means falling behind in the fight against an ever-evolving opponent.
“The mosquito is so smart that it continues to mutate, and the longer it mutates, the harder it is to fight," he said.
“We're seeing new vectors, disease vectors, like different kinds of mosquitoes coming into the U.S. and losing the ability to gain expertise and understanding of how to control these diseases is problematic,” says Joseph Amon, director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at John Hopkins.
Last month, the Trump administration terminated the contracts of thousands of global health projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). After a six-week review of USAID programs, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced more than 80% of them are canceled, saying those contracts “did not serve the core national interests of the United States.”
But Amon says those programs greatly impact U.S. public health.
“I don't think we should be thinking that we're somehow insulated from infections that don't have any need to get a visa and a passport to come into the U.S.,” Amon says.
“The damage is huge, and it's going to be seen in increasing fatalities because of global health threats both in the U.S. and massively overseas,” he added. “We're going to see a resurgence of a number of diseases that we've started to get a lot of control over.”
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Charles says RBM Partnership, which was launched by the WHO, UNICEF, United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank in 1998, had received a lot of funding from the U.S. government in the past.
“We don't want all the gains that has been made to to go away just like that,” he added.
The organization recently received a letter reversing its contract termination, according to Charles, but he told Scripps News that funding hasn’t restarted.
“We thank again that the U.S. government, for the consideration for us to continue the good work that we do, and we will definitely ensure that that money, as we've always done, continues to be put to good use for the benefits of not only Africa, but for the benefit of the globe.”
While the surviving 18% of USAID programs will now be run by the State Department, there is no indication these programs have had funding restored.
