It is a disease with a 50,000-year history. And it still kills 655,000 people a year - 85 per cent of which are children under the age of five.
And that is an improvement. Between 2010 and 2011, cases of malaria actually fell by 17 per cent - as a result of simple, medicated mosquito nets given out to those who need them most. Many of those people are in Africa, where the prevalence of malaria is highest.
