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I am Janet Cox Singh.
I work in the School of Medicine,
University of St. Andrews.
I've worked on malaria since 1983,
which is a very long time
and I have had the opportunity
to see things change,
sometimes they get better,
sometimes they get worse.
The title of my talk today
is Malaria - Changing Paradigms,
and I'll try to discuss
how we are addressing malaria
right now in 2016.
I'll talk mostly about drugs
and how we treat malaria.
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I'll start with the malaria statistics
that became available in 2015.
Currently, about just under
half of the world's population
are at risk of contracting malaria,
being infected by malaria parasite.
Now, obviously
not all of those 3.2 billion people
are at the same level of risk.
Some of them are at extremely low risk,
others very, very high risk
and, in fact, even within one country
the different populations
within that country
can be at totally different risks,
so it's very difficult to generalize.
All we can say is that too many people
are still at risk
of contracting malaria
in the world today.
The WHO reported
that there were 214 million cases
of malaria in 2015.
Now that's a number
and that's an estimate,
it can't be real because malaria occurs
in rural areas
of the most resource-poor countries
in the world.
So to gather data
actually takes money and time,
it takes an infrastructure,
and in a lot of places
where malaria is transmitted
those infrastructures aren't there.
So again, this is an estimate,
the real number is that we do not know.
Also in 2015, there were 438,000
reported deaths due to malaria.
The same rules apply.
We actually do not know
and that is the estimate.
What we do know
is that 88% of the cases
and 90% of the deaths
occur in sub-Saharan Africa,
the countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
And I've given a link
to that malaria fact sheet
that was updated in 2016,
that has all of these details
and an awful lot more information.
