Details of this study can be found in the journal “PLOS Pathogens.”

Next, we have a “bad news” “good news” story. The World Health Organization reports that malaria kills about 660,000 people around the world each year. The good news is the number of deaths has dropped 30 percent over the past 10 years because of progress in treatment and prevention.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders is providing the latest drugs to rural medical centers in Mali. In some areas, the infection rate dropped 65 percent in only a week. One mother of three young children says she saw a fast improvement in their health. She says her children often had higher than normal body temperatures in the past. But with the new medicines, they are much improved.

The World Health Organization fears that there will not be enough money to keep this kind of medical program operating. In 2011, international donors offered more than two billion dollars to fight malaria. That is less than half of what the WHO says is needed each year.

Some of the money goes for simple, but effective tools. Sir Brian Greenwood is with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“One of those is the humble bed net which people have been using for hundreds of years. But the relatively new advance has been in treating the nets with insecticide. Now, the insecticide is actually incorporated into the material.”