Cape Verde, an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, has become the third country in Africa to officially eliminate malaria, as the disease continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people on the continent every year, the World Health Organization said Friday.
After Mauritius in 1973 and Algeria in 2019, Cape Verde, an island nation with a population of about 500,000, is the third African country recognized by the World Health Organization as having completely eliminated malaria. The World Health Organization spoke in a statement of “a great success in public health.”
More than 40 countries have achieved the same certification, which is awarded when a country provides evidence that the chain of local outbreaks of infection by mosquitoes has been interrupted at the national level for at least three consecutive years.
However, malaria caused an estimated 608,000 deaths in 2022, with nearly 250 million infections worldwide, according to the World Health Organization website.
The fifty African countries bear a disproportionate share of the number of victims of this disease, as the number of deaths there reached 580,000 people, or 95% of the global total, and 94% of infections. Children under the age of five represent 80% of malaria deaths in Africa.
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