I wasn’t always a boring newsroom-bound editor. Back in my days as a Time magazine foreign correspondent, I used to fly to far-flung places, recorder and notebook in hand. That’s how, in the summer of 2005, I found myself in Mae Sot, a small city in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, tasked with contributing to a major cover package the magazine was producing on heroes of global health.

I was there to visit a rural medical clinic largely run by and for refugees from Myanmar’s military government. The patients were overwhelmingly there for one reason: malaria. While southeast Asia had made significant progress against the disease, malaria was still highly active in Mae Sot. I saw rows and rows of feverish patients laying motionless in their net-covered beds. And then, when I got back to my home in Hong Kong a few days later, I became one of them.

After a few extremely unpleasant days of shaking chills alternating with high fevers, my case resolved itself. I was lucky. Hundreds of thousands of people each year aren’t so fortunate. Over 260 million people contracted malaria in 2023, and nearly 600,000 died — the vast majority of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Malaria has been killing human beings for at least 10,000 years, if not longer. And for millennia, it was treated as a miserable fact of life. But today, malaria is no longer inevitable. Not just in places like the southern US, where it has long since been eradicated, but anywhere.

Since 2000, the global malaria death rate has been cut roughly in half. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that, between 2000 and 2023, malaria treatment and prevention programs averted about 2.2 billion cases and 12.7 million deaths worldwide. Countries from China to Sri Lanka to Paraguay have been certified malaria-free, and many more now report only a scattering of cases each year. A child born in Africa today is

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