A Letter from Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, CDC Director, on World Malaria Day  

April 25, 2023

Dear Colleagues:

Thanks to worldwide collaboration, malaria control and elimination have come a long way since the turn of the century. Working alongside local, national, and global partners, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria contributes unique scientific expertise to increase global health impact. CDC—a trusted scientific leader for malaria and co-implementer of the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative with the United States Agency for International Development—is immensely proud to have played a role in saving 11.7 million lives and preventing more than 2 billion malaria infections since 2000.

However, there were still 619,000 malaria deaths in 2021 and a staggering 247 million cases. In the United States, we are seeing approximately 2,000 cases each year, mostly from travelers who visited areas with malaria transmission. These numbers are unacceptably high.

On World Malaria Day 2023, we celebrate the progress that has been made while acknowledging the challenges we face. In recent years, the steep downward trend in malaria cases and deaths has flattened. Emerging threats such as parasites resistant to antimalarial drugs, mosquitoes resistant to insecticides, and mosquitoes invading new parts of the globe could imperil gains made over the past two decades.

Like the threats themselves, we must evolve. New interventions—and a better understanding of how and where to combine interventions—could accelerate malaria elimination around the world. Forward-thinking innovation and data-driven implementation are key.

Since 1979, CDC has collaborated with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) on the establishment of a premier malaria research field station. Over the years, CDC experts and local collaborators generated the evidence behind many tools and strategies used for malaria control today, not just in Kenya but across Africa, including the use of bed nets to reduce community spread. This collaboration remains critically important as we evaluate new tools in a real-world setting.

In collaboration with KEMRI and the University of Notre Dame, CDC researchers and others recently found that spatial repellents—a new vector control tool that works by releasing chemicals into the air which interfere with mosquitoes’ ability to detect a host and feed—effectively led to a reduction in malaria infections in children in Western Kenya, which is encouraging for the future of mosquito control.

In 2022, CDC, the National Institutes of Health, KEMRI, and other partners kicked off a clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a new monoclonal antibody product in providing protection from malaria over the course of a year. The initial phase of the trial demonstrated an excellent safety profile, and the second phase, assessing efficacy and safety, just began.

CDC experts are co-leading U.S. government efforts to support partner countries as they monitor, prepare for, and respond to the threat of Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes which recently invaded Africa and could potentially put 126 million additional people at risk for malaria, especially in urban areas.

CDC also provides scientific leadership to help partner countries rapidly detect insecticide and drug resistance and help them tailor their malaria control activities accordingly.

To ensure the health of pregnant women and their babies—those most susceptible to serious effects from malaria—CDC experts and their collaborators continue to study how best to administer preventive malaria treatments during pregnancy.

I hope the global health community will take time on April 25 to celebrate the progress we have made together while raising awareness that much more work needs to be done.

With gratitude,

Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH
Director, CDC, and
Administrator, Agency for Toxic Substances
and Disease Registry