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Malaria in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of malaria news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one item about malaria, with its date, location, tone, priority rating, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index, an average of 11.46% of each year's malaria coverage in the complete years 2019–2025 was published in April, the month of World Malaria Day (25 April), against 8.33% if coverage were spread evenly across the year.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched malaria articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025; April's share of all news was above the year's average in every year from 2019 to 2025.
Malaria's share of global news fell from 3.05 articles per 10,000 news articles in 2019 to 1.89 in 2025, a 38% decline, while raw article counts rose from 3,596 to 5,089 as the index grew.
Basis: Annual malaria articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
October 2021, the month in which the World Health Organization recommended the RTS,S vaccine for wide use, was the month in which malaria took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 5.44 articles per 10,000, 1.91 times the 2021 average.
Basis: Monthly malaria articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026; 2021 annual share 2.85.
Machine-assigned priority ratings placed 80.6% of malaria articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 1.89 times the 42.6% share for all news, although only 35.5% of malaria articles were negative in tone, close to the 33.6% for all news.
Basis: Top priority and sentiment labels per article; critical = priority ≥ 7; 62.1% of labelled malaria articles were positive in tone (all news: 56.8%).
Vaccine equity and access in low-income regions appeared in 2.44% of themed malaria articles between January 2023 and July 2026, 207.65 times its frequency in all themed news, and global vaccination campaigns in 4.29%, 173.7 times their frequency.
Basis: Theme labels assigned to each article; lift against all themed news.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 1,338 | 22.61% | 1.71 |
| United States | 1,131 | 19.11% | 0.39 |
| Nigeria | 671 | 11.34% | 8.27 |
| Ghana | 264 | 4.46% | 9.26 |
| United Kingdom | 184 | 3.11% | 0.53 |
| Kenya | 176 | 2.97% | 13.55 |
| Uganda | 150 | 2.53% | 42.98 |
| Brazil | 138 | 2.33% | 2.7 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "malaria" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Malaria in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/malaria/