Malaria cases in Bangladesh have fallen about 80% since 2010, to 0.86 per 1,000 people at risk

Malaria incidence in Bangladesh fell from 4.23 new cases per 1,000 people at risk in 2010 to 0.86 in 2024, according to WHO estimates.

4.23 → 0.86

New malaria cases per 1,000 population at risk, 2010 to 2024.

That is a fall of roughly 80% in 14 years. The decline has not been smooth: incidence dipped to 0.42 in 2020 and 0.50 in 2021, then rose to 1.23 in 2022 and 1.10 in 2023 before easing again in 2024. Year-to-year swings of this kind are common in a disease that is concentrated in a few areas, where a local outbreak or a change in testing can move the national figure.

For policy, the lesson is that low national incidence is not elimination. Sustaining the decline depends on keeping surveillance, testing and treatment running in the places where cases remain, rather than treating malaria as a solved problem.

A caveat on the data: these are modelled WHO estimates for the population “at risk”, not a count of every case. The World Bank series shows an identical value (6.62) for every year from 2000 to 2005, which suggests those early figures were carried forward rather than measured, so this chart starts in 2010.

Source: World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory, via World Bank WDI (SH.MLR.INCD.P3).