Malaria
A preventable mosquito-borne disease that still kills a child roughly every minute.
Severity score
54.5
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Steady
What this is
Malaria mortality is heavily concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and among children under five. Progress stalled in the 2020s as insecticide resistance, drug resistance, funding gaps and climate-driven range expansion offset gains from bed nets and new vaccines. It is one of the most cost-effective mortality reductions available anywhere, which makes the persistent toll a resource-allocation failure as much as a biological one.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
80Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
74People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
30Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
10Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
45Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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