Hla Mima smiles after receiving free malaria treatment at an SMRU clinic. While the recent Commonwealth pledge is a boon to the global health community, experts believe it is only by wiping out malaria in south-east Asia – through the ‘nuclear option’ of targeting whole populations – that true progress will be made. ‘It is hard. People don’t want to move outside their comfort zone of the current approaches. We need very high level political commitment and the money,’ said Professor Sir Nick White , chair of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, which ran the study Dr Alex Kumar is an academic clinical fellow at King’s College London and photographer