Question: Do you think that a country’s financial state can impact how prevalent malaria is? If so, then could you please elaborate on why e.g. a less developed country might have higher cases of malaria?

Alena Pance answered on 22 May 2020:

Hi Sophia, a country’s financial state has massive impact in the prevalence of malaria and infectious diseases in general. If the economy is not working properly priorities change and one of the first things that collapses is surveillance, meraning that under a prosperous economy there is a system to follow up on people who get infected, register the number of infections and importantly where in the country they are appearing. This allows putting extra resources in the right places such as treatment and medical assistance. Under economic pressure availability of medicines and drugs is not appropriate so people either don’t receive treatment or medicate themselves or end up using sub-optimal doses of drugs and all of this increases the number of people who are burdened with the disease and therefore are able to pass it on. So a stable economy and also a stable society are extremely important to keep infectious diseases under control. Here is an example of the real case of the country where I grew up, very worrying:

Infectious diseases make a comeback in Venezuela following healthcare crisis