The malaria situation in Venezuela continues to worsen and now threatens regional malaria elimination efforts including Ecuador’s participation in the G-2020 group of countries that hope to eliminate malaria by next year – 2020. Malaria has returned in small case numbers to the Tumbes Region of Peru and El Oro Province on the Pacific Coast of Ecuador near the border with Peru. Most of the cases were in Venezuelan migrants, with a few autochthonous cases in local residents.
On April 16th of this year, Drs. Adriana Tami and María Eugenia Grillet presented a talk at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Amsterdam where they estimated that Venezuela experienced around one million new malaria cases during 2018.