The number of malaria cases rose in many countries in 2016, suggesting that progress has halted in the global fight against the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a report on 29 November

For the first time, we can confidently say that we have stopped making progress. We know what happens when we stop applying pressure. Malaria comes back with a vengeance.

Globally, malaria infections increased by about 5 million from 2015 to 2016, for a total of 216 million, with apparent jumps in parts of Asia, Africa and South America. The number of people who died from the disease remained relatively steady, at around 445,000, the WHO found. Although data on malaria is often inexact in countries with weak health-care systems, many researchers are concerned by the trends described in the WHO report, which the agency attributes to flat funding levels for anti-malaria programmes.

The spread of drug-resistant malaria is also a worry. Strains of Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes the most deadly form of the disease, have become resistant to artemisinin in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

Read the full article on malaria by Amy Maxmen at Nature