Global climate change and land alerations are impacting the environments where malaria is transmitted, modifying old predictors as seasonality and geography, and making new territories environmentally suitable for malaria transmission.

On World Malaria Day 2025, World Health Organisations join the Roll Back Malaria partnership promoting this year’s theme “Malaria Ends With Us: Reinvest, Reimagine, Reignite”, to re-energize efforts at all levels, from global policy to community action, and accelerate progress towards malaria eradication (latest data on the WHO Malaria fact sheet)

This blog calls attention to Springer Nature OA and hybrid content relating to Malaria, echoing the UNs SDG3 goal of global health equity: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Content is also specific to targets 3.1 (Reduce maternal mortality), 3.2 (End all preventable deaths under 5 years of age) and 3.4. (Reduce mortality from non-communicable diseases and promote mental health). Attention needs to be kept focused by policymakers to coordinate and intensify global efforts in the long term, but also on the funding for research, to continue innovation and testing of upcoming strategies, drugs and devices.

Highlights from Springer Nature:

Browse our Journal Collections

Browse the dedicated BMC paper collection titled “Alternative interventions to facilitate malaria elimination”: this thematic series of the Malaria Journal launched in 2020 collects published papers on innovative approaches (open for submissions). Read latest papers and learn more about effectiveness of new open-air emanators, how modifying rice field flooding dynamics can improve mosquito control and how Anopheles symbionts naturally occurring can help on mosquito population control.

Find related Articles

The OA Journal Nature Communications offers an article on the development of an improved blood-stage malaria vaccine, while Nature Reviews Microbiology  has features papers on Malaria vaccines: a new era of prevention and control, focusing on steps Towards next-generation treatment options and Artemisinin partial resistance, a major threat to malaria treatment. The latest SN editor post on the Scientific Reports OA portfolio features contents from the Top 100 most read publications in microbiology, including on  Transmission of transgenic mosquito-killing fungi. Fungi that express insect-specific neurotoxins sound odd, but they show promising to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, thus reducing malaria transmission. Touching on specific target 3.1 Reduce maternal mortality, the BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth OA journal offers latest Malaria-related insights as: diagnostics of HIV, TB and malaria in Lao (PDR), studies on intermittent treatment in pregnancy with malaria in Ghana. More on climate change and Malaria on Nature Africa.

Check highlights from ISRCTN clinical study registry

In this most recent Behind The Paper post for World Malaria Day 2025, Prof. Kathryn Maitland discusses the SMAART consortium, the only multi-site, multi-country collaboration conducting research in paediatric severe malaria in Africa.

A study is testing the safety and practicality of infecting healthy UK adults with malaria to understand how the parasite grows and how the body responds. The information gained will help develop a new method of testing future therapies for relapsing malaria such as vaccines: 80-90% of P. vivax malaria cases are thought to be due to relapsing infections.

A prospective multisite severe malaria observational study in African children characterises epidemiology (including features at presentation, diagnostic and treatment pathway) of severe malaria in children in Africa upon hospital admission.

A novel molecular-based test, Dragonfly, might help in detecting low parasite-density infections. The study Evaluating a novel diagnostic test for the detection of Plasmodium infections at community level in Gambia and Burkina Faso aims to evaluate its diagnostic accuracy.

The Trial of PermaNet 3-barrier bed nets is part of an operational distribution programme in Haut-Katanga province, Democratic Republic of Congo: the study aims to compare two types of insecticidal bed nets used to prevent malaria.

Read Research Communities Blogs

Check out blogs from across the Research Communities, touching on topics relating to Malaria, as this post SN BEN and SDG 3: A Commentary for World Malaria Day that explore malaria’s impact on youth, its diagnosis and treatment, and the power of education and advocacy. The fresh blog  on malaria and its devastating impact on Hawaiian birds is a stern reminder of how intertwined anf fragile life in our biosphere is. A January “Behind The Paper” post wraps up a recent study on Generating sterile Anopheles mosquitoes to combat malaria transmission, while another one unveils the fate of Mosquito nets, (the latter in the BugBitten blogs). The Anti-malaria Vaccine is yet to come, but research is key in validating antimalarial immunity, as the RC post on a late liver-stage malaria vaccine candidate proves.

Explore Springer Nature Book Content

There is a wealth of Malaria-related content (Open Access or available through academic subscriptions) and free abstracts and frontmatter pages for all to browse. To name a few: a collection of case studies on Malaria Control and Elimination in China (2025), a work on Neglected Tropical Diseases - Sub-Saharan Africa (2024), and the title Integrated Science for Sustainable Development Goal 3 (2024) to help policy-makers in performance assessment and implementation of strategies. More on the social incentives of mosquito Control in Challenging Malaria (2023), on the epidemiology of Desert Malaria, a chapter on Artemisinin-Resistant Malaria forms as potential Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (2019) and the dedicated Malaria volume in the “Essentials” book series.

Watch a TED Talk

A still very timely 2024 TED Talk by Dr Abdoulaye Diabaté, a medical entomologist, titled "How to end malaria once and for all" is worth watching: Dr Diabaté highlights the potential of "gene drive" technology to disrupt mosquito reproduction and halt malaria transmission, particularly in Africa.

Get involved

Choose how to have an impact for World Malaria Day this year: visit the official WHO campaign website, read their how to guides to be an advocate, fundraise, organise an event, reach out to the media, or access the ready social media resources.

Cover Image credits: Insecticide-treated bed nets have helped prevent malaria infections in the past but are becoming less effective. Photo by BK Kapella, MD (CDR; USPHS) Public domain.