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Malaria kills twice as many as thought: study

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Malaria kills more than 1.2 million people worldwide a year, nearly twice as many as previously thought, according to a new research published on Friday.

The new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in the United States of America and published in The Lancet Journal questions years of assumptions about the mosquito-borne disease.

According to the study, past studies had overlooked hundreds of thousands of deaths because they had wrongly assumed malaria overwhelmingly killed babies and focused their findings on under-fives.

The new study found 42 percent of deaths were actually among older children and adults.

The higher number of victims showed the need to increase funding to fight malaria, even as governments came under pressure to cut their aid budgets amid the global economic crisis, said the researchers.

Overall, malaria deaths worldwide rose from 995,000 in 1980 to a peak of 1.8 million in 2004, before falling again to 1.2 million in 2010, the study found.

The World Health Organization's latest global report said the estimated number of malaria deaths fell to 655,000 in 2010, almost half the number in the IHME study.

Malaria is endemic in more than 100 countries worldwide but can be prevented by the use of bed nets and indoor spraying to keep the mosquitoes that carry the disease at bay.

Effective malaria drugs known as artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs, can cure the infection but access to these medicines is often hampered in poor countries, where funding is limited and health services are patchy.

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