After three years in Bethesda, Maryland, management of the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) moves to Sweden this month where it will be based at three Stockholm institutions: Stockholm University, the Karolinska Institute and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control. The transfer becomes official at the Third MIM Pan-African Malaria Conference in Arusha, Tanzania.

In 1997, Harold Varmus, then director of the National Institutes of Health, argued for stepping up worldwide research on malaria, given the disease's enormous impact on global public health. The MIM was established to respond to this challenge, and was first based at the Wellcome Trust in London, with a charter that called for the Secretariat to move to a new institution every three years.

Since 1999, the Secretariat has resided at the NIH's Fogarty International Center (FIC). “The goal ultimately is to have the MIM Secretariat situated in Africa,” says FIC director, Gerald Keusch. Representatives of African research institutions already make up half of the voting members, but concerns about funding shortages and a lack of infrastructure have so far kept the Secretariat in industrialized countries.

Initially, the MIM struggled to distinguish itself from other malaria research and control efforts but appears to have carved out a niche in the politically charged world of international public health. “[MIM] has been driven by scientists and science, and the orientation has been to help ensure ... the science is not co-opted or controlled by the malaria control agenda,” says Keusch. While stressing that he is not criticizing efforts like the World Health Organization's (WHO) Roll Back Malaria campaign, Keusch says the MIM fought to avoid the internal and international political pressures that often accompany WHO programs.

A MIM reassessment of the worldwide burden of malaria provides sobering statistics: over 1.5 billion new infections occur annually, with 2.7 million deaths. Over 75% of the victims are African children under the age of 5.