7 Facts You Need to Know About World Malaria Day

Friday marks World Malaria Day, an annual awareness campaign to shed light on the preventable and curable disease that still kills hundreds of thousands every year.

This year's World Malaria Day continues the theme "Invest in the future, defeat malaria," calling attention to the many efforts to end all malaria-related deaths by 2015.

"We eliminated malaria in the U.S. in 1951, so thankfully malaria isn't something we have to think about every day," Martin Edlund, CEO of the non-profit Malaria No More, tells Mashable. "World Malaria Day is a moment to shout from the rooftops about the remarkable progress we’re making — including a 54% reduction in the rate of child deaths in Africa since 2000 — but also the fact that we have more work to do. A child still dies every minute from malaria, so we’ll keep shouting every World Malaria Day until we fix that." Read more...