Malaria deaths down 60% in 15 years

Deaths from malaria have dropped 60% in the last 15 years, although three billion people remain at risk, a World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unicef report has found.

The lives of 6.2m people, mostly children, have been saved since 2000 and a target to cut deaths has been met “convincingly”, it said. New cases of malaria have dropped by 37% in 15 years.

In 2015, there were 214m new cases of malaria, while 438,000 people died of the disease. 3.2bn people, almost half of the world’s population, are still at risk of malaria, the study said.