Experts believe that more people are now dying of malaria that did so three decades ago, and warn that it is spreading to new countries.
The disease is now present in non-tropical countries such as Turkey and Russia. In addition, a handful of people die of malaria every year in the United States, a country that eradicated the disease back in the 1950s.
Although it is mainly a disease of tropical and sub-tropical countries, malaria has been identified in eastern European countries such as Russia and Turkey and recently a handful of cases were diagnosed in the US.
Many factors have been blamed for this, including increased resistance to antimalarial drugs; political and social upheaval which moves populations into endemic areas; changes to the environment such as road building and irrigation, providing ideal breeding habitats for mosquitoes; budget restraints in developing countries, and the mosquitoes’ growing resistance to modern insecticides.
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Tags: Health, Malaria
