1 million deaths from malaria per year

Malaria remains a global health problem of staggering dimensions and despite many efforts to fight the disease; the situation today is worsening with more than 1 million deaths per year. African children below the age of five and pregnant women are those most severely affected by the disease.

In November 2005 the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) arranges the Fourth MIM Pan-African Malaria Conference, an international malaria meeting focusing on Africa. The meeting will be held in Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon. The MIM conferences are currently the largest meetings worldwide, focusing solely on malaria. The upcoming meeting in Yaoundé is estimated to attract more than 1,500 participants including malaria researchers, policy makers from endemic countries, the World Health Organization (WHO), and pharmaceutical industry. One of the aims is to promote collaboration and stimulate dialogue between scientists and the public health sector so as to strengthen the chain from basic research to translation of new findings into effective control measures, including production and distribution of new antimalarial drugs, bed nets and testing new vaccine candidates.

MIM is an international alliance of organizations with the overarching goal to strengthen malaria research capacity in endemic countries – primarily in Africa. The MIM Secretariat rotates and is since the beginning of 2003 hosted jointly by the Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University. The MIM model of supporting researchers in endemic areas has proved to be successful in promoting translation of research findings where the disease is prevalent.

http://www.mim.su.se/conference2005