Richard Curtis: Malaria is a savage killer — which is why I back the effort to beat it

''I’m really interested in malaria''. Not a sentence my 30-year-old self would have expected me to write — in those days I was only really interested in Debbie Harry and the films of Francis Ford Coppola. But my 30 years with Comic Relief has made me sort of obsessed with this disease, which some believe has actually killed half of the people who have ever lived.

And when I was 30 it was killing a million children a year. I’m obsessed by it because not only is it such an utter bastard of a disease — a single mosquito bite in the night stealing away the life of a child — but because our generation could wipe it out. If we all focus, experiment, are generous, intelligent and determined this could be a massive success story.

The reason I’m writing about it now is because this week there is a group of people who have been brought together by the Commonwealth for a Malaria Summit who are being generous, determined and focused —and that’s going to help change the world.

But let’s just reflect on malaria a bit more. A few years ago I wrote a film for the BBC called Mary & Martha, about two women who lose their children to the disease, where I tried to show some of the real horror of it. There’s a peculiar human quirk where we seem to care more about malicious death than death by disease.

It makes no sense to me — when children are killed by a tyrant the world primes itself for war. If one child is kidnapped, quite rightly, the nation is mortified and traumatised and marshals huge resources to find them. But in 2013, when I wrote Mary & Martha, 450,000 children under five were dying of malaria each year — horrible, brutal, painful deaths.

About 1,200 brutal, avoidable tragedies every day. And what makes this so perverse is that somehow the thought is that if a child is deliberately killed, there’s something we can do it about — whereas the truth is almost the exact opposite.

It’s hard to fight the vagaries of violence but it’s much, much easier to put together a plan to defeat a disease which takes incomparably more lives.

That’s why what’s happening this week in London is so intelligent and important. We are asking Commonwealth leaders to halve deaths from malaria over the next five years. Their collective action could prevent 350 million cases and save 650,000 lives.

Leaders from governments, business, philanthropy and international organisations are going to commit over £2.7 billion to tackle malaria, including developing new scientific tools, better data collection and a hugely scaling up of access to life-saving interventions.

I hope the readers of the Standard will not feel this is a strange and distant thing — one of the most moving things about Red Nose Day and Sport Relief over the past decade has been the British public’s amazing generosity towards malaria charities.

When Gary Barlow, Alesha Dixon, Ronan Keating and friends climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 2009 the British public bought more than a million malaria nets. When David Tennant made an appeal in 2013 from a hospital in Uganda, it generated one of the most incredible responses Comic Relief has seen, raising millions of pounds in a matter of minutes.

This enthusiasm was then reflected by the Government, which has given nearly half a billion pounds a year to the effort against malaria since. And thank God this passion is now being followed through. Just yesterday the Prime Minister reaffirmed this, a level of commitment that our nation can be proud of, and urged her fellow leaders to play their part.

It’s particularly important timing because after recent successes the fight against malaria has been stalling. Death rates had been slashed by 60 per cent in just 15 years but funding has shifted and progress has stalled. The death rate has stopped falling.

This is a tragedy not only because of the precious lives lost. No country can prosper when huge swathes of its people are afflicted with disease. In the new book by the late Hans Rosling he offers compelling evidence that progress in health and economic prosperity go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other.

Defeating malaria could be the single most important priority in lifting Africa out of poverty. The countries that will most benefit are our key trading partners of the future.

There’s a feeling these days that we’re all going to hell in a handcart and there’s nothing we can do about it. But as an advocate for the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals — the Global Goals — I’m seeing huge evidence of exactly the opposite.

The goals are a comprehensive plan — 17 goals, 169 targets — that every country in the world agreed to in 2015. And things are shifting. There’s real progress on climate change. There’s real change in businesses realising that without having social purpose embedded in their behaviour, they will not thrive. There’s a huge upsurge in political engagement by younger generations all over the world.

It’s the old story of the Tortoise and the Hare: don’t let the glamour of pessimism and terrible headlines — the showy Hare of Horror — distract you from what the Tortoise of Progress is doing. And one of the huge areas of progress is the battle against diseases — polio is nearly eradicated; the battle against mother-to-child transmission of HIV is being won. And now — this week — the Commonwealth is making colossal strides in the fight against malaria.

The Malaria Summit isn’t just another side-meeting of people who are here primarily to have lunch with the Queen. It’s a genuinely historic moment that will help save countless lives and free up the world from the curse of the nastiest diseases around. Real news. Real good news.

• Richard Curtis is a writer, director, Red Nose Day co-founder and UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate