World Malaria Day is April 25, a day to acknowledge the depths of our failures against this disease.

We’ve known how to prevent and cure malaria for over a century, but hundreds of millions are infected and more than 1 million die every year.

Some fundraisers say all that is required is a $5 donation to buy a mosquito net for a vulnerable child. If only it were so simple.

The problem with that claim is two-fold.

First, malarial mosquitoes bite children not only at night when they are sleeping but also during the day when they are walking around. Over a dozen species of mosquito transmit malaria, with widely varying habits.

Second, malaria is a disease that flourishes when we disrupt local ecologies. Without controlling environmental disruptions, we will never fully control malaria in the most hard-hit places.

The World Health Organization noted in the early 1990s that multinational companies, by aggressively extracting minerals and timber from developing countries, were escalating the spread of malaria.

In the late 1990s, for example, more than 120,000 fell prey to falciparum malaria in Peru, compared to under 150 cases a year earlier in the decade. Logging companies had descended upon the rainforest, and the fast-falling jungle proved fruitful for the local malarial mosquito Anopheles darlingii, which settled thickly in the disturbed lands.

Making matters worse, drug-resistant strains of malaria are annexing whole new swaths of the planet, from the war zones of Afghanistan and the highlands of Kenya to the banks of the Panama Canal and the alleys of Mumbai. The death toll, compared to 1961, has quadrupled.

The one drug that effectively treats multi-drug-resistant malaria is based on an ancient Chinese medicine called artemisinin. But profit-driven drug companies have already compromised its effectiveness.

It is essential that the drug is taken in combination with other drugs, so that the parasite is not able to evolve resistance to this one last cure. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drug companies sold artemisinin on its own throughout Africa and Asia.

By 1994, Chinese scientists, who had formulated a combination artemisinin drug, sold the rights to drug giant Novartis. But Novartis didn’t launch the combination drug until 1999, and when it did, it priced the drug at $44 per course.

In 2001, Novartis dropped the price to $2/course, but that was still 10 to 20 times more expensive than the older — but useless — malaria drugs. And Western aid organizations refused to foot the bill.

As a result, the underground market in stand-alone artemisinin drugs continued to thrive. By 2004, the parasite had started to evolve resistance. The World Health Organization publicly criticized the drug companies that sold stand-alone artemisinin drugs.

“It will be at least 10 years before a drug that good is discovered,” bemoaned the Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization’s anti-malaria effort. “Basically we’re dead.”

Drug companies like Novartis and mining companies like ExxonMobil now lead charitable anti-malaria efforts, along with billionaires like Bill Gates. Predictably, limiting damaging industrial development or brand-name drug distribution is off the table. Instead, they’re pushing for more mosquito nets, and a high-tech vaccine, which as of yet is still a long way off.

We know enough to control environmental disruptions that aggravate malaria. The Tennessee Valley Authority, widely credited with stanching malaria in the U.S. South, wrote a book about it.

We know enough to foster public-health-oriented drug development and distribution.

So buy a mosquito net, and donate money to the search for a malaria vaccine by all means, but know that until we act on all our knowledge, malaria will remain as it always has been: our cross and consort.

Sonia Shah is the author of “The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients” (New Press, 2006) and creator of a new website devoted to independent commentary on malaria, ResurgentMalaria.com. Her book on the history and politics of malaria is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.