The success of efforts that target polio have raised hopes that
it could be the next human disease to be eradicated within the
decade. But that's not the only disease that public health
officials have targeted. The UN has actually set a goal of
eliminating all deaths caused by malaria—by 2015. To reach that
goal, development agencies boosted spending on malaria control
efforts to over $1 billion annually over the course of the past
decade. That has definitely had a significant impact on the
disease, as all estimates of deaths due to malaria indicate it
has been going down since about 2005. But the latest study of
the disease suggests that we've been significantly
underestimating how many people it has been killing. Malaria is
an extremely difficult parasite to control, in part because it's
a complex organism. In contrast to viral and bacterial
pathogens, malaria is caused by eukaryotes (from the genus
Plasmodium), which have larger and more complex genomes. The
parasites' complex genomes have helped them evol