Global health: Cape Verde, 4th African nation to be declared malaria-free

Cape Verde, the West African archipelago of ten islands, has officially been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as malaria-free, hailing it as a significant milestone in the fight against the disease.

The historic milestone makes the Portuguese-speaking nation only the fourth country in the African region — and the 44th in the world — to achieve the malaria-free status, following Mauritius in 1973, Morocco in 2010 and Algeria in 2019. During a live ceremony, which was attended by by the WTO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Cape Verde Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva welcomed the milestone. “For a country in which tourism is its main economic activity, the elimination of malaria is the elimination of a constraint on mobility, the elimination of a perception and the reinforcement of sanitary confidence,” said Silva.

With no recorded cases since 2017, Cape Verde has had a long journey to become free of the disease, which killed 608,000 people globally in 2022. With 94% of the 249 million recorded cases globally in 2021, Africa has by far the highest number of cases of the mosquito-borne disease in the world, according to the WTO estimates.

The archipelagic nation in the central Atlantic Ocean faced severe epidemics in densely populated areas before it implemented targeted interventions. “Cape Verde’s success is the latest in the global fight against malaria, and gives us hope that with existing tools, as well as new ones including vaccines, we can dare to dream of a malaria-free world,” the WTO chief said.