Insecticide-Treated Nets and the Persistence of Childhood Survival Gains to Adulthood

Malaria is a mosquito-borne parasitic disease. In sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of cases are caused by Plasmodium falciparum infection in young children. In this region in 2020, there were an estimated 228 million cases and 602,000 deaths from malaria; 80% of the deaths occurred in children younger than 5 years of age. 1 A series of community-based randomized, controlled trials that were conducted across a range of malaria transmission settings in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s showed that insecticide-treated mosquito nets substantially reduced the incidence of malaria and death from this disease among children. 2 Since then, treated nets have become . . .