Global estimates for 2024
These are modelled estimates, not counted cases. Many malaria cases are never tested or reported, so WHO combines surveillance data, household surveys and statistical models. The ranges are WHO's 95% uncertainty intervals.
Map: where malaria strikes
Tap or hover over a country for its 2024 estimate. Incidence means cases per 1,000 people living in areas at risk. It's the fairest way to compare countries of different sizes. Switch to total cases to see where the most people are affected.
Grey countries have no WHO malaria estimate, mostly because they're not malaria-endemic. Zero means WHO estimates no indigenous cases. Some small island states (Comoros, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cabo Verde) are too small to show at this map scale. French Guiana is drawn as part of France. Use the country finder or the table for those. Boundaries: Natural Earth (simplified); they don't imply any position on disputed borders.
The 20 countries with the most estimated cases
Click a column heading to sort. Figures in grey are the 95% uncertainty range.
Global trend, 2000–2024
Estimated malaria cases worldwide each year. The shaded band is the 95% uncertainty range.
How malaria spreads
Malaria is caused by single-celled Plasmodium parasites, not by a virus or bacterium. People mostly catch it from the bite of an infected female Anopheles mosquito. Only females bite, because they need a blood meal to produce eggs.
When an infected mosquito bites, parasites enter the bloodstream and travel to the liver to multiply. They then invade red blood cells, which causes fever, chills and headache. Another mosquito biting that person can pick up parasites and carry them on to someone else. Malaria doesn't spread from person to person like a cold. It can, rarely, pass through blood transfusions, shared needles or from mother to baby.
Five Plasmodium species infect humans. P. falciparum is the deadliest and the most common in Africa. P. vivax dominates in most countries outside sub-Saharan Africa. Young children, pregnant women and travellers without immunity face the highest risk of severe illness.
How it's prevented and treated
- Insecticide-treated bed nets. These protect people while they sleep, which is when Anopheles mosquitoes usually bite. Newer dual-ingredient nets help where mosquitoes have become resistant to older insecticides.
- Indoor residual spraying. Coating the inside walls of homes with insecticide kills mosquitoes that rest there after feeding.
- Antimalarial drugs. Fast diagnosis and artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) cure most cases. Preventive medicines protect groups at high risk, such as seasonal chemoprevention for young children and preventive treatment in pregnancy. Travellers can take chemoprophylaxis.
- Vaccines. WHO recommended the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine for children in October 2021 and a second vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, in October 2023. Both are now being rolled out in routine childhood immunisation across a growing number of African countries.
Health information here is general. If you're travelling to a malaria area, talk to a doctor or travel clinic several weeks before you go.
Sources and methods
- Country, regional and global estimates (every estimate in the headline cards, map, table and chart): World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory OData API. Indicators: MALARIA_EST_CASES (estimated number of malaria cases), MALARIA_EST_DEATHS (estimated number of malaria deaths) and MALARIA_EST_INCIDENCE (estimated incidence per 1,000 population at risk). Data year 2024. WHO last updated these records on 19 December 2025, and I fetched them on 4 October 2026. Indicator codes were checked against /api/Indicator.
- Headline figures and context: WHO, World malaria report 2025 (published 4 December 2025). It reports 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths in 2024, up from 273 million cases and 598,000 deaths in 2023. See also the WHO malaria fact sheet and the GHO malaria theme page.
- Transmission, prevention and vaccines: WHO malaria fact sheet.
- Latest updates: each item in the “Latest updates” section links its own source (WHO, Gavi, the Global Fund, Nature). I checked them on 4 October 2026. They add context and don’t change the 2024 estimates.
- Further context: the Malaria Atlas Project publishes detailed sub-national maps of malaria risk. Those maps aren't used for the figures here.
- Map boundaries: Natural Earth 1:110m countries (public domain), simplified. Map library: Leaflet.
Methods and caveats
- All figures are estimates with wide uncertainty, especially in high-burden countries where many cases go undiagnosed. I show WHO's 95% uncertainty intervals wherever WHO provides them.
- Headline numbers are rounded the same way WHO rounds them. Exact model values (such as 281,741,573 cases) only look precise. Read them as "about 282 million".
- Incidence uses the population at risk of malaria, not the whole national population. Shares of the global total are my own calculations from the WHO figures.
- WHO revises past estimates each year, so figures can differ slightly from older reports.
- The table and map include the 109 countries and areas with a 2024 WHO estimate. 81 of them have more than zero estimated cases.
Data files: malaria_2024.json · malaria_2024_by_country.csv