Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, World Malaria Day, held on April 25th of this year, attracted a lot of activity on social media. As shown in the analysis below, mentions of malaria-related terms reached nearly 45,000 hits both this year and in 2019. This demonstrates that despite attention centered COVID-19, the malaria community is still able to come together and advocate for the eradication of this disease.
Figure 1: Spike in mentions of #malaria, #WorldMalariaDay, #palu, #paludisme, #ZeroMalariaStartsWithMe on social media between 11 April-10 May 2019.
Figure 2: Spike mentions of #malaria, #WorldMalariaDay, #palu, #paludisme, #ZeroMalariaStartsWithMe on social media between 11 April-10 May 2020.
This year, the United States, India, the United Republic of Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain have been the most active in their mentions of World Malaria Day on social media.
BAAM also built on the RBM Partnership’s work to developed a suite of sample messages and campaign images to help promote #WorldMalariaDay and the Business Alliance Against Malaria.
These social cards linked with messages such as those shown below helps highlight the importance of maintaining robust health systems to manage and mitigate the impact of existing diseases like malaria, alongside emerging ones like COVID-19. In particular, the critical need for resilient health and surveillance systems in times where these systems are facing new challenges and grappling with long-standing deadly and dangerous foes such as malaria.
· Robust health and surveillance systems alongside prevention and control interventions help ensure millions of the most vulnerable are protected from #malaria and new diseases like #COVID-19. #WorldMalariaDay
· #COVID-19 has disrupted the production and supply of many #malaria commodities. Health systems need support to ensure that they can get the critical health products they need to maintain essential malaria services during the outbreak #WorldMalariaDay
· Addressing #COVID-19 should be a top priority. But on #WorldMalariaDay, we should urge leaders not to ignore other killers like #malaria since overburdened systems are a threat to progress made to date on #malaria. BAAM members stand committed to play their part. https://www.malariabizalliance.org/
As we can see, social platforms are a powerful way to connect with others to build awareness, communicate authority within the malaria space, show authenticity, encourage engagement, and provide support.