Malaria, an ancient scourge of mankind, causes a heavy burden of mortality and morbidity in populations living in tropical and subtropical regions around the globe. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, Report 2013), 3.4 billion people (40% of the world’s population) live in areas of risk. In 2012, ca. 230 million clinical malaria cases were reported and about 627,000 patients, primarily children below the age of 5, died due to malaria – more than 1,000 young lives lost every day.
Countries where malaria is endemic face serious public health problems: the disease causes not only most severe individual suffering, it has also a deleterious impact at many levels of people’s life including education, worker productivity, fertility and medical costs. Important and increasingly urgent, malaria severely impedes travel to endemic areas, and, concomitantly, investments and exchange of experts, crucial preconditions for infrastructural and economic development.