Malaria , whose World Day is dedicated to Tuesday, April 25, is still a deadly disease in Africa despite vaccines being found, due to growing drug resistance, according to the World Health Organization .

Malaria caused 619,000 deaths worldwide in 2021, according to the latest statistics issued by the organization.

In the following are five basic information about this disease, which appeared since ancient times, and its source is a single-celled parasite of the genus Plasmodium, which is transmitted to humans through mosquito bites, and causes several symptoms such as fever, headache and chills, which leads to a serious condition that may become fatal if not treated. :

The World Health Organization estimated the number of people infected with malaria in 2021 at about 247 million, which is a higher number than the previous year (245 million).

About half of the world's population lives in malaria-prone areas and can therefore become infected with it.

However, infants, children under five, pregnant women, and people living with HIV are most likely to develop a severe form of the disease.

The vast majority of cases (95 percent) and deaths (96 percent) are in Africa, and this region continues to "bear a disproportionately large share of the global burden of malaria," according to the World Health Organization.

More than half of the recorded malaria deaths in the world are concentrated in four African countries: Nigeria (31.3 percent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (12.6 percent), Tanzania (4.1 percent) and Niger (3.9 percent).

The greatest number of deaths occurs among children under the age of five, as 80 percent of the victims in Africa belong to this age group.

This disease is treated with "complex drugs based on artemisinin", but disturbing cases of resistance to these drugs have appeared in Southeast Asia (in the Mekong basin) and Africa, especially in Uganda, Rwanda and Eritrea.

This situation prompted the World Health Organization to launch, at the end of 2022, a strategy to address this "urgent problem" in Africa, one of the most prominent aspects of which is "strengthening surveillance of the efficacy and resistance of antimalarial drugs."

"Any threat" to drug efficacy would have "catastrophic consequences" and could result in "large numbers of cases of infection and death from the disease," warned Dr Dorothy Echo, head of the Tropical and Vector-borne Diseases Team in WHO's African Region.

The emergence of a new invasive vector of malaria in Africa, the Anopheles mosquitoes from Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, poses an additional threat to malaria control in this continent.

This insect, which has become widespread in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Nigeria, is adapted to the urban environment and is resistant to many of the insecticides currently used.

To date, the use of insecticide-treated nets has been the main method used to control this disease preventively.

Since October 2021, WHO has recommended the use of the RTS,S malaria vaccine for children residing in areas with medium to high rates of malaria transmission.

And the organization stated that this vaccine, which was reached by the British “GSK” pharmaceutical group, “significantly” reduces the emergence of the disease and the risk of death in young children.

Vaccination campaigns were organized in three African countries: Ghana, Kenya and Malawi.

Ghana also recently authorized a new malaria vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, the first country to give the green light for the use of this highly promising vaccine.

The World Health Organization hopes to reduce the death rate from malaria by at least 90 percent by 2030. Since 2015, ten countries have been officially declared malaria-free, including Argentina (2019), Algeria (2019) and China (2021).