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The bark of the cinchona and its product, quinine, have been used in the treatment of malaria for centuries. After World War II, they were largely replaced by the synthetic analog chloroquine. The use of chloroquine, in addition to the use of DDT for mosquito control, was expected to eradicate the disease, but in the 1960s several strains of the malarial parasite developed resistance to chloroquine. This, plus the growing immunity of mosquitoes to insecticides, has caused malaria to become one the of world's leading re-emerging infectious diseases, infecting an estimated half billion people a year and killing up to 2 million. Sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (S/P) is used instead of chloroquine in areas where the disease has become highly resistant to the latter, but resistance to S/P is also now a problem in some areas. Artemisinin is an alternative treatment for S/P resistant strains. Vaccines against malaria are still experimental. The mosquitoes that carry the parasite are also controlled by spraying, which has eradicated the disease in some areas (Sardinia, Japan, and Taiwan), but a World Health Organization campaign (1955–69) to eradicate the disease globally (by controlling mosquitoes long enough to allow the human population to become disease free) proved unsuccessful.
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