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
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.