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A Road Map For Ending Malaria Deaths

Late last year, the World Health Organization said it's possible to end deaths from malaria as soon as 2015.

It won't be easy, mind you. But widespread use of insecticide-treated nets and indoor spraying to kill mosquitoes have already helped a lot.

And now the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a big funder of malaria projects around the world, put together a snazzy infographic that shows how the goal could be reached. Tool around and see for yourself, country by country.

Our colleague Tom Paulson, who's the impressario at the global health blog Humanosphere, notes some concerns about funding for the fight against malaria becoming pretty concentrated, with the Gates Foundation as a particularly big source of money.

But the fix, he writes, isn't for the Gates Foundation to cut its financial support. Instead, it's time "for the rest of the international community to increase and diversify funding for malaria interventions and research."

To see a full-size version of the infographic, you can click here.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Scott Hensley edits stories about health, biomedical research and pharmaceuticals for NPR's Science desk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has led the desk's reporting on the development of vaccines against the coronavirus.