The New York Times and the Washington Post each published Feb. 14 articles claiming climate change is accelerating the spread of malaria. The title of the New York Times article claimed, “Climate change is spreading malaria in Africa.” The Washington Post title claimed, “Climate change may make it easier for mosquitoes to spread malaria.”
Given such claims, we should see rising numbers of malaria cases and malaria deaths. Yet neither has happened.
The alarming claims made by the New York Times and the Washington Post are in response to a newly published paper written by biologists at Georgetown University, home to the Georgetown Climate Center, a well-funded organization that has predetermined climate change to be a “crisis” and raises money by claiming an urgent need to address it. That doesn’t mean readers should dismiss at face value all claims by Georgetown’s paid staff, but it should raise a warning signal to reputable media not to accept such claims at face value, either. As is the case with any stories and claims, the media should probe whether such claims are true.
The central claim of the newly published paper is that the range of malarial insects is spreading poleward by approximately three miles per year. If true, that is not much range expansion. Nevertheless, it is apparently enough to draw feature stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. The New York Times summarized the paper by claiming that climate change “may explain why malaria’s range has expanded over the past few decades.”
But is it true that malaria’s range is expanding? The answer is clearly no. In fact, just the opposite is happening.
The World Health Organization’s “World Malaria Report 2022” documents that the world malaria map is, in fact, shrinking. Since 2000, 23 nations, home to more than a billion people, have become malaria-free. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, El Salvador, Belize, Argentina, and Paraguay have all eradicated malaria since 2000. Many of those nations accomplished the feat just in the last three years.
Importantly, many of the nations that have recently eradicated malaria were previously at the poleward limit of malaria’s range. While climate activist "researchers" and their media allies claim that climate change is causing malaria to expand poleward, the objective data show that malaria range is contracting back toward the equator.
It is not just malaria range that is shrinking, either. The number of malaria cases and deaths is also shrinking.
The "World Malaria Report 2022" documents a steady decline in global malaria cases from 245,000 in 2000 to 232,000 cases in 2019. During the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, cases rose back to year 2000 numbers, but the report emphasizes that COVID disruptions and restrictions had much to do with that.
More strikingly, global malaria deaths steadily declined from 897,000 in 2000 to just 568,000 in 2019. Even the COVID bump in 2020 and 2021 saw malaria “peak” at just 625,000 deaths.
Historically, malaria has not been constrained to tropical nations. More than 500 cases of malaria were reported in Finland during the mid-1800s. During the early 20th century, an outbreak of malaria occurred in England. Another outbreak occurred in Archangel, Russia, inside the Arctic Circle. Two thousand years of global warming ago, Alexander the Great died of malaria on the banks of the Euphrates River, where malaria does not exist today.
Whatever the conjecture is by "researchers" funded by global warming activists, the undeniable fact is malaria’s range has been shrinking for decades, and the number of malaria cases and malaria deaths is shrinking along with it. Don’t trust the headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Trust the objective facts instead.
James Taylor (JTaylor@heartland.org) is president of the Heartland Institute.