Malaria In India : Stats

Malaria kills 13 times more Indians every year than was estimated, says a study which junks World Health Organization's estimates.
    WHO says the vector-borne disease kills around 15,000 Indians annually. But a new study by Indian, British and Canadian researchers and published in the British medical journal The Lancet on Thursday said that malaria actually claims over two lakh lives every year. Ninety per cent of these deaths were in rural areas, and 86% did not occur in a health care facility. Around 55,000 deaths occurred in early childhood, 30,000 between the age of five and 14 and 1,20,000 from 15 to 69 years.
    Researchers based their estimate on direct interviews with family members of over 1.22 lakh people who died across 6,671 sites in India between 2001 and 2003. The study is part of the Million Death Study (MDS), which seeks to assign causes to all deaths in sample areas from 2001 to 2013.
    Speaking to TOI, professor Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto and one of the study's lead authors, said, "The key finding is that a lot more people in rural India are dying of malaria unattended, inside their homes. Malaria in India could now be killing more people than HIV."
    Jha added that the health ministry relies on WHO's data, "which, we believe, is a major underestimation. WHO only counts patients who tested positive for malaria at a hospital setting.
    "We conducted direct interviews with those who died of symptoms closely resembling malaria, like high fever and shivering, but didn't get a blood test done."
    He added, "WHO's methodology is flawed because most of those who reach a hospital with malaria do get treated. Those who die are the ones who don't reach a hospital."
    Dr Nata Menabde, WHO's representative-designate to India, said WHO has serious doubts about the high estimate. "The study uses verbal autopsy method which is suitable only for diseases with distinctive symptoms and not for malaria whose symptoms are common with many other diseases which could result in many false-positives."
    He added that the Registrar General of India has cautioned against malaria cases being estimated by the verbal autopsy method as this may include other fevers.