According to a report in SciDev.net a new study in Nature suggests that.

“The threat to human health posed by the deadliest form of malaria has been significantly underestimated, especially for regions outside Africa, according to research published today (10 March) in Nature. The study suggests that the Plasmodium falciparum parasite caused 515 million cases of malaria in 2002 – nearly double the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate — and threatens some 2.2 billion people worldwide.”

The Nature paper has started a bit of a “row” over WHO estimates according to The New Scientist which reports,

“Has the World Health Organization underestimated the world’s malaria problem? By as much as 50%, according to researchers in Kenya. Not true, the WHO itself insists. At stake is the credibility of the WHO’s anti-malaria programmes. In this week’s Nature (vol 434, p 214), Bob Snow and colleagues from the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi calculate that there were 515 million new cases of malaria worldwide in 2002. This is almost double what they quote as the WHO’s official figure of 273 million cases. Snow claims that international efforts to control malaria are being damaged because the WHO is underestimating the problem. The WHO disputes this analysis. The figure of 273 million comes from its 1999 World Health Report. The following year it revised its official estimate to between 300 and 500 million cases – roughly the same range as Snow’s 300 to 660 million – and that is the figure the WHO says it has been working with ever since.”

The Nature study raises some very basic questions about resource prioritization in areas of research and implementation. Snow et al. write in Nature,

“Interest in mapping the global distribution of malaria is motivated by a need to define populations at risk for appropriate resource allocation and to provide a robust framework for evaluating its global economic impact … Inadequate descriptions of the global distribution of disease risk make it impossible to determine priorities and advise funding agencies appropriately. Redressing these deficiencies with robust data must be a priority if international agencies are to understand the size of the challenge set by their targets over the next ten years.”

How can we make effective decisions about research priorities if we have inaccurate knowledge of important dimensions of the problem that the results of research are supposed to be addressing? This is a fundamental obstacle to effective science policy decision making, but one that can be addressed, as Snow et al. argue, through research itself.