WHO, the public health arm of the United Nations, estimates that approximately 15,000 people a year die from malaria in India, and 100,000 adults worldwide.
The researchers called for both figures to be urgently revised so they do not hurt funding for prevention, rapid diagnosis and treatment.
“If you do not know the disease in any area, your requirement of drugs and all that (will not) be correct. Your control program will suffer, it’s really important to know these figures correctly,” Vinod Sharma of India’s National Institute of Malaria Research said in a telephone interview.
The new numbers would boost WHO’s estimate of around 860,000 malaria deaths a year, most of whom are children under five, to more than a million, but WHO disputed the analysis.
Sharma said WHO based its estimates on figures provided by governments and it would be important for governments to put in place reliable disease surveillance systems. India detects only 1,000 malaria deaths each year, he added.
The study, led by Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto in Canada, was published in The Lancet medical journal.
The team sent field workers to 6,671 areas in India from 2001 to 2003 to interview families of 122,000 people who died.
The data suggested that about 205,000 people died from malaria in India each year — 55,000 young children, 30,000 children aged 5-14 and 120,000 people 15 and older.
“If WHO estimates of malaria deaths in India or among adults worldwide are likely to be serious underestimates, this could substantially change disease control strategies, particularly in the rural parts of states with high malaria burden,” the researchers wrote.
Deccan Herald