Nature
Volume 514 Number 7520 pp5-134 2 October 2014
http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue.html

Ebola outbreak shuts down malaria-control efforts
Public-health experts fear that one epidemic may fuel another in West Africa.
Erika Check Hayden
As the Ebola death toll spirals into the thousands in West Africa, the outbreak could have a spillover effect on the region’s deadliest disease. The outbreak has virtually shut down malaria control efforts in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, raising fears that cases of the mosquito-borne illness may start rising — if they haven’t already.
So far, at least 3,000 people are estimated to have died of Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the current outbreak, although World Health Organization (WHO) staff acknowledge that official figures vastly underestimate the total. By contrast, malaria killed more than 6,300 people in those countries in 2012, most of them young children. Overall, malaria deaths have fallen by about 30% in Africa since 2000 thanks to national programmes supported by international funding agencies such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the US Agency for International Development and the WHO’s Roll Back Malaria initiative. The schemes distribute free bed nets to protect sleeping children from mosquitoes, train health workers to find malaria cases and offer tests and treatment at no charge to patients.
But the Ebola outbreak has brought those efforts to a standstill in the three affected countries. “Nobody is doing a thing,” says Thomas Teuscher, acting executive director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, based in Geneva, Switzerland…