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Comment by killjoywashere | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source on this 3000 kids a day? That's over 1M children a year. Assuming most of those are in Africa, you're claiming something like a 2% childhood mortality from malaria alone. The all-cause childhood mortality in Africa is considered astronomical at 7.8%. The WHO (UNICEF) says the death rate of malaria in Africa is more like 1 every 2 minutes, which comes out to 720 a day.

One dead child is too many and I worry that number inflation only makes the fight harder.

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Got that stat from UNICEF: https://www.unicef.org/media/files/MALARIAFACTSHEETAFRICA.pd...

UNICEF seems to contradict themselves here then https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/malaria/

Those stats are for children under 5. So the total for children more broadly defined is likely to be higher.

From the page

> In 2017, there were 219 million malaria cases that led to 435,000 deaths. Of these 61 per cent (266,000) were children under 5 years of age.

And per day that translates to:

435,000 / 365 = 1,192

266,000 / 365 = 729

The numbers are a bit weird:

> Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, about 3000 children every day. > Over one million people die from malaria each year

3000 deaths per day * 365 days in a year = 1 095 000 deaths per year

So basically no adults die from malaria?

Most malaria victims are children, 57% of deaths are children under 5 years old https://ourworldindata.org/malaria

Malaria is just as deadly to adults who have never been exposed to it as it is to children under 5 years old. However the more times you catch it, the more immunity you build to it. An adult who has caught malaria multiples times is not likely to die from it. An adult tourist catching it for the first time can be in trouble.

That documents lacks a date, but it seems to be old information. Based on [1] and [2] it seems that the numbers given in that document are from around 2005 or before, but there has been a lot of progress since then.

[1]: https://www.unicef.org/media/files/MalariaFactSheet.pdf

[2]: https://endmalaria.org/sites/default/files/RBM Annual Report 2018_EN.pdf (page 6)

WHO says ~1100 deaths/day, well below 3000

https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...

The stats for malaria is insane - Nature wrote an article that said malaria could have killed half of all humans who have ever died.

https://www.nature.com/articles/news021001-6

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