How China became malaria-free, going from 30 million cases a year in the early 1950s to zero today

On International Workers’ Day this year, as many around the world were stuck working from home, unlikely colleagues from Britain, Ghana and Senegal landed at Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport.

The weary travellers had their body temperatures scanned, passports checked, and waiting drivers escorted the men to their hotel. The trio would need to travel much further in-country, but that would have to wait until they got some rest. Two weeks of rest to be specific, as they rode out their Covid-19 quarantine periods.

Six months before their arrival, each scientist had received a dossier from the People’s Republic of China, via their membership of an expert panel at the World Health Organization (WHO), inviting them to visit and survey containment efforts in the country.

They were not there to probe the origins of Covid-19, however, but to confirm Beijing’s claims of having eliminated malaria.

While the world was focused on various and variegated waves of Covid-19, the three scientists perused the WHO-delivered Chinese files, which included several national and provincial reports, as well as technical documents, detailing malaria-control efforts from as far back as the 1950s.

“We had the chance to get a broad view of things that have been happening all over China,” says Brian Greenwood, professor of clinical tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The 83-year-old is also on a 10-expert committee tasked by the WHO with researching and recommending countries claiming to be malaria-free. In China’s case, Greenwood says “it must have been a few thousand pages of documentation that we shared among us on the committee”.