Malaria kills almost twice as many people as had previously been believed. Previous estimates had been 655,000 deaths a year, but the actual figure is 1.2 million.
The error stemmed from the mistaken assumption that malaria primarily kills children, and that people who are exposed to the disease but survive develop immunity. However, when deaths in children over 5 and adults were studied more closely, they proved to account for 42% of all malaria deaths. This finding overturns medical consensus and renders decades of World Health Organization statistics useless.
Time Magazine reports:
“... [T]his is not the first time the people running developing-world health campaigns have been shown to have only the loosest understanding of the problems they are tackling. The ... report was followed a day later by one from the Indian Council of Medical Research that claimed malaria deaths in India were 40 times as high as previously estimated.”