Lessons from Zanzibar: How the isles beat malaria

Zanzibar is looking forward to eliminating malaria, one of the leading killer diseases, by 2023. Courtesy of Getty Images

Merab

By Elizabeth Merab

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For Mwashamba Idi and Juma Ali Juma, both residents of Zanzibar Island, malaria is not a common part of their disease vocabulary.

Matter-of-fact, malaria, a disease that kills a child every two minutes, is unheard of among many residents of the Unguja (Zanzibar Island) of whom have either never had the infection before, or not for a long time. This is because the Island has managed to reduce its prevalence of malaria to below one percent, meaning that extremely few people, mostly travellers and migrant workers test positive for the mosquito-borne disease.

Using a variety of strategies like annual indoor/outdoor residual spraying, the revolutionary government of Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous government within Tanzania has been able to keep malaria-transmitting mosquitoes at bay. Zanzibar is made up of a series of islands in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania, where until 2003, the transmission of malaria was more common. Over the last two decades, however, the island has maintained malaria prevalence below one percent.

In 2020, an estimated 627,000 people died of malaria—most were young children in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the latest World Health Organisation’s (WHO) World Malaria report, there were an estimated 241 million malaria cases worldwide in 2020.

Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. It occurs mostly in poor tropical and subtropical areas of the world. In many of the countries affected by malaria, it is a leading cause of illness and death.

In areas with high transmission, the most vulnerable groups are young children, who have not developed immunity to malaria yet, and pregnant women, whose immunity has been decreased by pregnancy. The mosquito-borne disease is among the five leading causes of death in children under five years, including pre-term birth complications, pneumonia, birth asphyxia, and diarrhoea.