According to the best evaluations of the World Health Organization, almost five hundred million of people catch down with malaria every year and among them two millions are the ones who die of it. But what worse is that 90% are African children under five years old due to the lack of health services. Today malaria kills a child every 30 seconds: three  thousand children under five years old die per day.
These data are due to the fact that 2.400.000.000 people (40% of world population) live in countries exposed to malaria risk. 90% of these cases are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria has become the first cause of death; in fact the number of cases is growing of 40% in the last 25 years.
Malaria is endemic in 101 countries: 45 in Africa, 21 in Southern America, 4 in Europe, 14 in the Middle East, 8 in South-East Asia and 9 in the Pacific area. 50% of African patients do not react anymore to chloroquine (the chief antimalarial drug), due to bad prescriptions and uses. Other drugs cost from 10 to 100 times more then chloroquine.

Areas where malaria transmission occours

All drugs, like chloroquine and fansidar, were found to be inefficient, but recently new successful ones were developed (combinations based on artemisin, ACT). ACT therapy lasts just three days and costs 60 cent for a child and 2 dollars for an adult.
In March 2004 WHO took control of the organization drugs supplyings, thanks to Global Fund, who tried to collect enough ACT amounts for the countries who ask for.
Unfortunately, at present, only 9 on 33 African countries who decided to change therapy can actually get ACT and they have just begun to use these more effective therapies against malaria. Then the majority of countries is keeping on adopting drugs which don’t work anymore.