Malaria kills 2 lakh in India every year: Lancet report

According to a new study in The Lancet, Malaria kills nearly 2 lakh people in India every year, including 80,000 children below 15 years of age.

The report runs counter to the World Health Organisation (WHO) which has estimated the number of deaths due to malaria in India at 15,000.

The Lancet report says that 90 per cent of the deaths were recorded in rural areas of which 86 per cent occurred at home with no medical attention. The study started in 2002, and was conducted across 6,671 areas, each with around 200 households each.

Led by teams from the office of the Registrar General of India, Centre for Global Health Research at St Michael's Hospital and University of Toronto, Canada, the study found that the highest number of deaths 50,000 were reported from Orissa. Other states with high incidence of the disease are Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Assam.

According to professor Prabhat Jha, co-lead author of the study who spoke to the Indian Express, in the absence of other diseases, on current death rates, a newborn in Orissa had a 12 per cent chance of dying from malaria before the age of 70 years as against 2 per cent for the average Indian baby.

Jha said the WHO goes by properly diagnosed malaria patients for the estimates, which could lead to misleading conclusions.