How Malaria affects the Life Expectancy rate of a country.

Alisa Foster

Statistics Research Paper

“The higher the cases of malaria are in a country, the lower the life expectancy rate is.”

Malaria is an old time virus/disease that has been around for many many decades. It mainly comes from mosquitoes. It is derived from the Italian word for “bad air”. It was originally thought swamp fumes in Rome were the cause of malaria. They thought this was true because there were regular occurrence there of outbreaks. What malaria really is, is a life-threatening blood disease caused by parasites transmitted to humans through the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. Once an infected mosquito bites a human and transmits the parasites, those parasites multiply in the host's liver before infecting and destroying red blood cells. (Medical News Today. MediLexicon International, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2017.)

The malaria virus has killed many people all over the world. Worldwide, there were an estimated 198 million cases of malaria in 2013 and 584,000 death. Malaria incidence rates are estimated to have fallen by 30% globally between 2000 and 2013 while estimated mortality rates fell by 47%. The cause of this decrease is because vaccinations came into play. A vaccination is a product that produces immunity from a disease and can be administered through needle injections, by mouth, or by aerosol. Vaccinations are very helpful for many different types and kinds of diseases. During the 20th century, malaria was eradicated from many temperate areas, including the whole of the EU. As a result, the disease is now essentially limited to tropical countries. With global climate change, the potential for the reappearance of malaria in countries where it was previously eradicated exists but is relatively small. Anopheles mosquitoes are in fact still present in those areas, including in Europe. ("Malaria." Malaria. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2017.)

The number of cases of malaria affects life expectancy in a couple countries before 2006. This is due to the number of people dying from this nasty disease. The number of deaths can cause life expectancy to decrease  because not enough people are surviving.