China was certified today by the World Health Organization (WHO) as officially free of malaria, joining a club of 40 countries globally, but only three others in the WHO Western Pacific region, that have completely eliminated the disease.

After having gone four years with no reported cases, China applied for malaria-free certification from WHO in 2020. Inspectors from WHO visited the country in May and verified that the “chain of indigenous malaria transmission by Anopheles mosquitoes has been interrupted nationwide” — even in southwestern Yunnan, which borders three malaria-endemic countries, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.

Back in the 1940s, China recorded as many as 30 million cases of malaria each year, and 300,000 deaths, per Science magazine. These numbers were driven down to “roughly 5,000 annually in the late 1990s,” and zero by 2017 after the implementation of strict reporting and tracking requirements for health departments.[…]

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