Geneva (AFP)

China has succeeded in eradicating malaria after 70 years of fighting this mosquito-borne disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday.

The country, which had 30 million cases per year in the 1940s, has not reported a single indigenous case in the past four years.

This parasitic disease which is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito killed more than 400,000 people in 2019, mainly in Africa.

“We congratulate the Chinese people for ridding the country of malaria,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

"China joins the growing number of countries showing that a future without malaria is possible."

“This hard-earned success is the result of decades of focused and sustained action,” he continued.

Countries that have recorded three consecutive years without local transmission can apply for certification from the WHO to validate their status as a malaria-free nation.

They must accompany this request with very rigorous evidence and demonstrate their ability to prevent any further transmission.

China is the 40th territory to obtain this validation from the WHO, based in Geneva.

The latest were El Salvador (2021), Algeria and Argentina (2019) and Paraguay and Uzbekistan (2018).

And a separate list specifies the 61 countries where malaria - also known as malaria - has never been rife or has disappeared without specific measures.

China is the first country in the Western Pacific region in the WHO nomenclature to receive this certification in over thirty years.

Only three countries have benefited so far: Australia (1981), Singapore (1982) and Brunei (1987).

In its 2020 report on malaria in the world published in November, the Organization found that progress in the fight against the disease was stagnating, especially in African countries which have the heaviest tolls in terms of contamination and death. .

- Majority of children -

After a steady decline since 2000, when the disease caused 736,000 deaths, the number of deaths was estimated at 411,000 in 2018 and 409,000 in 2019. More than 90% occur in Africa and mainly concern young children (265,000).

In 2019, there were 229 million cases of malaria, a level that has been maintained for four years.

Beijing began in the 1950s to identify places where malaria was spreading and to fight it with preventive antimalarial treatments, the WHO noted.

The country has also eliminated areas favorable to mosquito breeding and increased the use of insecticides in homes.

In 1967, he launched a scientific program to find new treatments that led to the discovery in the 1970s of artemisinin, the main disease drug extracted from a plant.

In the 1980s, China was among the first countries to experiment with insecticide-infused mosquito nets.

According to a report carried out in 1988, more than 2.4 million had been distributed throughout the country.

The number of cases dropped to 117,000 by the late 1990s and deaths were reduced by 95%.

Additional efforts undertaken in 2003 made it possible to drop to around 5,000 contaminations per year within ten years.

"China's ability to venture off the beaten track has been successful in its fight against malaria and has also had an important domino effect at the global level," said Pedro Alonso, director of the global malaria program within of the WHO.

After four years without local contamination, Beijing applied for certification in 2020. Experts went there in May to verify the absence of a local case and to ensure the device to avoid re-emergence.

But the risk of imported cases remains a source of concern, especially from neighboring Laos, Burma and Vietnam who are struggling with the disease.

A vaccine candidate has demonstrated a hitherto unmatched efficacy of 77% in trials in Africa, announced at the end of April the University of Oxford, its developer.

This serum could be approved within two years.

© 2021 AFP