Taipei, Taiwan – Until recently, Southeast Asia’s Mekong sub-region seemed to be on track to reach its goal of eliminating malaria by 2030.Named for the 4,900-kilometre (3,000-mile) river that runs from southwest China through Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the area has long been afflicted by the mosquito-borne illness.
From 2010 to 2023, the number of cases caused by the most common malaria parasite declined from nearly half a million to fewer than 248,000, according to the Global Fund, a United States government-funded organisation that is the world’s largest financier of programmes to prevent, treat and care for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Nearly 229,000 of those cases were reported in a single country, Myanmar, where the illness exploded with the outbreak of a civil war in 2021 and the displacement of millions of people.
As US President Donald Trump’s administration severely scales back foreign aid with the effective dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), health campaigners now fear that the progress made in the Mekong will be lost after officials targeted Myanmar’s anti-malaria initiative for elimination. Advertisement
“We were throwing all our resources at [Myanmar], but by stopping this, malaria is going to spill back into Southeast Asia and the Mekong sub-region,” Alexandra Wharton-Smith, who worked on USAID’s Myanmar programme until being laid off by the Trump administration, told Al Jazeera from Thailand.
Myanmar’s government has estimated that cases have risen 300 pe …
