Could We See the End of Malaria?

The Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg once estimated that malaria has killed half of the people who have ever lived. In 2015 alone, it killed almost half a million people, 70 percent of which were children. Today, about 3.2 billion people are, according to the World Health Organization, at risk of contracting it, most of whom are children and pregnant women.

It’s brought on by a blood parasite—about 50 times smaller than the width of a human hair—the most common and deadly of which is , which thrives in Sub-Saharan Africa. It rides on the needle-like mouth of a mosquito, known as a proboscis, until it gets injected into