Malaria milestone

Africa: Concentrated funding for treatment—and the controversial return to insecticides—is beginning to lower malaria's scourge | Priya Abraham

Zanzibar's hospitals and clinics are noting a conspicuous absence. Once more than half their drop-in patients were children sickened with malaria, what the islands' health minister Mohamed Saleh Jiddawi called the country's "greatest scourge." Now the figure is dropping as the disease fades.

The plunge in malaria is precipitous, thanks to a year-long, U.S.-funded effort to beat the disease. From January to September 2006, the number of malaria cases on one island, Pemba, fell 87 percent, from about 12,500 cases to 1,500. The change came after a year of spraying almost every home with insecticide and distributing bed nets.

Though Pemba is only a small sample, the island's success is the kind President George Bush wants to repeat across Africa. In 2005 he announced the President's Malaria Initiative, a five-year, $1.2 billion program to halve malaria deaths in 15 countries.