Malaria is killing more people worldwide than previously thought, but the number of deaths has fallen rapidly as efforts to combat the disease have ramped up, according to a new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.More than 1.2 million people died from malaria worldwide in 2010, nearly twice the number found in the most recent comprehensive study of the disease. The researchers say that deaths from malaria have been missed by previous studies because of the assumption that the disease mainly kills children under five. They found that more than 78,000 children aged 5 to 14, and more than 445,000 people aged 15 and older died from malaria in 2010, meaning that 42 percent of all malaria deaths were in people aged 5 and older."You learn in medical school that people exposed to malaria as children develop immunity and rarely die from malaria as adults,” said Christopher Murray, the study’s lead author. "What we have found in hospital records, death records, surveys and other sources shows that just is not the case.”The study also found that while the overall number of malaria deaths is higher than earlier reports, the trend in malaria deaths has followed a similar downward pattern. Starting in 1985, malaria deaths grew every year before peaking in 2004 at 1.8 million deaths worldwide. Since then, the number of deaths has fallen annually and, between 2007 and 2010, the decline in deaths has been more than seven percent each year.Researchers say the biggest drivers of the decline in malaria deaths have been the scaleup of insecticide-treated bed nets and artemisinin-combination treatments. This has been accomplished through the advent of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria & Tuberculosis in 2001 and the creation of organizations focused on fighting malaria, such as the World Health Organization’s Roll Back Malaria, Malaria No More and Nothing But Nets. Overall funding for malaria efforts grew from less than 250 million U.S. dollars annually in 2001 to more than two billion in 2009, according to the researchers’ latest estimates.The new findings were published Thursday in The Lancet.