By Daniel Tseghay

April 25 marks World Malaria Day, reminding us of one of the deadliest diseases in the world. Caused by mosquito bites transmitting any one of the plasmodium family of parasites, malaria infects about 300 million people every year and kills somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.7 million of them. And these are only the more conservative or optimistic numbers. The Kenya Medical Research Institute, for instance, believes there are 515 million cases of the most harmful form of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, alone.

Once you’re bitten, the parasite courses through your bloodstream, making its way to your liver, where it festers and multiplies while you feel not a thing. Whether it’s a few days, weeks, or months, the symptoms will arrive, flu-like in nature, producing fevers, some muscle aches, the sweats, fatigue, headaches, and vomiting. Unlike the flu, however, if it goes untreated, there is a significant chance it will kill you.

Well, not you, if you happen to live in Canada or the United States, or any other country that largely eradicated the disease about half a century ago. Malaria has pretty much cordoned itself off to the global south and to the people who are least able to protect themselves. In Africa, for instance, the heat makes it the perfect climate for the mosquitoes to live and thrive, and the cases of malaria are nearly 100 percent of the time caused by the deadliest form, P. falciparum. As a result, 30 of the 35 most affected countries are on the African continent.

Though malaria is an ongoing problem, the world community this year has a special opportunity to significantly reduce the number of people infected by this preventable disease. This summer, the G8 summit will take place in Canada and, running up to it, a number of important preliminary meetings across the country will help set the agenda.

Immediately following World Malaria Day, for instance, G8 development ministers will meet in Halifax, from April 26 to the 28, to discuss aid funding and, in particular, Canada’s highly touted initiative to improve maternal and child health in the global south.

What better place to begin than with a serious commitment to fighting malaria? In Africa, for instance, about one in five deaths among children under the age of five can be chalked up to malaria. If infected in the middle of pregnancy, a woman can face severe anemia and other life-threatening illnesses, with low birth weight in the infant, if the mother hasn’t succumbed to the disease, as a likely consequence. And, to make matters worse, the temperature increases caused by climate change will, researchers believe, mean people will face deadly mosquitoes for greater parts of the year, and locales normally outside the reach of the heat-loving insects will be inundated for the first time.

As host of the G8 summit, and in light of its stated commitment to maternal and child health, the Canadian government must lead the call to make malaria in the global south as much a thing of the past as it now is in the global north. We should spend more to invest in insecticide-treated mosquito nets, for they can save about one in five children who would otherwise have been killed by malaria. We can spend more on administering intermittent preventive treatments to pregnant women, whether or not they have any of the symptoms, to completely forestall what may have befallen the expecting mother and her baby. And Canada can call for an increase in the investment of the very effective artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs—an antimalarial treatment that is not made useless by the increasingly resistant malaria parasite.

These are all attainable goals whose costs are nowhere near their effectiveness. Whether or not Stephen Harper and the Canadian government will call for such investments is anybody’s guess. We can only say that doing so would make sense when maternal and child health is the key part of the agenda. And that for so many people to die of a preventable disease is a shame which must speak to our deepest sense of right and wrong.

Daniel Tseghay is a Toronto-based journalist.