The Fogarty International Center (FIC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is organizing the Third Pan-African Malaria Conference of the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM). The MIM conference will be held November 17 to 22, 2002, in Arusha, Tanzania.

The MIM conference will bring together malaria researchers from across Africa and around the world to consider malaria research advances, how to more effectively employ or develop malaria-control strategies, and how to strengthen malaria research training activities. More than 700 malaria researchers and control experts will attend the MIM conference.

MIM is an international alliance of research and public health agencies and African scientists established in 1997 in Dakar, Senegal, at the first Pan-African Malaria Conference. MIM's objectives are to stimulate and support collaborative research to address the needs of public health programs in malaria-endemic countries and to strengthen research capacity in malaria-endemic countries. FIC, which serves as the current MIM Secretariat, organized the conference on behalf of the MIM partners.

Major sponsors include the NIH (the Fogarty International Center, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the National Library of Medicine), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, the Swiss Development Cooperation, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Health Organization, The Wellcome Trust, and the UK Medical Research Council.

Malaria kills 2.7 million people each year, mostly African children under the age of 5. Over 1.5 billion new infections occur annually, resulting in enormous economic burdens. These numbers are on the rise due to insecticide resistance, antimalarial drug resistance, and environmental changes.