Malaria

How should you read Malaria data?

Disease-burden figures are modelled estimates, not simple death counts, and that distinction matters when you read them. They draw on vital registration, hospital records, surveys, and statistical modelling to fill gaps where direct reporting is weak, so the precision implied by a decimal point is wider than it looks, especially for countries with limited health-information systems. Rates are usually age-standardised to allow fair comparison between younger and older populations, which can move a country's apparent ranking up or down relative to a crude count. Because definitions and methods are periodically revised, two figures from different release years are not always directly comparable. Read these numbers as the best available signal of relative burden, useful for spotting patterns rather than for pinpoint accuracy.

Malaria falls within the communicable disease category in the WHO Global Burden of Disease classification. Estimated malaria mortality rate per 100,000 population This 2024 ranking has 106 country observations, with values reported per 100K pop to support like-for-like comparison within that year. It includes the 97 countries with a same-year population of at least 1,000,000, so a handful of modelled deaths in a microstate cannot crown the list. The unweighted mean across all country observations is 16.9; it is a reference point, not a population-weighted global rate.

The highest recorded Malaria rate in the 2024 comparison is in Niger at 131.2 per 100K pop. That is 518.6x the cohort median of 0.3 per 100K pop across 97 eligible countries. At the other end of the same comparison, United Arab Emirates records 0.0 per 100K pop. The spread describes differences in the published estimates; it does not by itself establish why they differ or diagnose conditions in any country. The top 50 countries above show the highest values in this dataset, while the lowest values are shown alongside where applicable to make the full range visible.

Click any country name to open its full profile on PlainCountries, which combines this disease rate with population, GDP per capita, life expectancy, healthcare spending, and dozens of other indicators. Reading disease mortality together with economic and social context is more informative than either number in isolation. All disease figures on this page are sourced from the WHO Global Health Observatory under a CC BY 4.0 licence and are identified by WHO indicator code MALARIA_EST_MORTALITY. Rates are age-standardised where WHO provides the adjusted series, which removes the effect of differences in population age structure between countries.