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Published online 26 February 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.621
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Malaria map brings good news
Disease transmission is low throughout large areas of malarial risk.
Some 2.4 billion people live in places where they risk catching the deadliest form of malaria. But a new study brings some good news: 1 billion of them live in zones where transmission is so low that the disease should be easy to bring under control, or even eradicate.
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Am I being simple, or do I spot a methodology problem? Across Africa, the borders between red, pink and grey zones mostly follow national boundaries. In South America, they delineate the basins of the Amazon, Para, Orinoco and Essequibo rivers. How come?
i guess, that is mainly because of scanty and heterogeneous data. there is a possiblity that the reports they refered to collected their data with different standards and methodlogy, and some data in particular countries are absent, as discribed in the article, "patchy". So when you put those "patchy" and "poor quanlity" data in a picture, differences between countries may just delineate boarder between countries or areas with different data quality.
Malaria in South East Asia The finding that South East Asia and Western Pacific has 47% of the world’s population at high risk of falciparum malaria is an especially important one to highlight. In addition, 84% of the world’s population at low risk are shown in the paper to be in this region and the authors suggest this group is the most likely to be helped by control measures. Parts of Southeast Asia have the highest levels of antimalarial drug resistance in the world and markers suggesting newly evolving artemisinin resistance have recently been found for the first time in Cambodia. If this continues to evolve and spreads elsewhere the implications for malaria treatment and control worldwide could be enormous. This combination of a high malaria burden, likely amenability to control measures and the urgent need to intensively investigate and control drug resistance comprise a strong case for devoting a larger proportion of funds for malaria research and control to Southeast Asia. Fortunately, with increased attention from the Gates Foundation, among others, this reallocation appears to be happening already.
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I agree with Giles and Keith. For example, in my country Venezuela, that map doesn't fix it all. I have reviewed the paper in PloS Medicine where these maps were originally published, and there, you will find maps for each world region. In those maps the real distribution of malaria is not reflected. This group has based in most cases the malaria distribution in prevalence studies and as occurs with the Venezuela data, not in official information, that in some cases is more complete to define the distribution. In any case, the sources of information should be more inclusive than exclusive, as has been with sources to the MAP project and consequently for this malaria maps.