"But long before that we can eliminate - which means local eradication - from a number of countries in this region. And the 10 countries that have come here (for the meeting) are the elimination countries, those with an ambition to get rid of it much sooner than 2050. "A hundred countries in the world have already done it. If you think rough terms, there are 200 countries in the world - 50 years ago they all had malaria, now only half half of them have malaria. Now we're working with the other half."

Of the countries under the microscope at the Brisbane meeting of minds, the challenges are varying due to mitigating factors like country size, civil unrest and political instability. "China has the challenge of scale ... it's just so big. They've made a lot of progress already but finishing the job is just a big-scale enterprise because everything in China is a big-scale enterprise," he said. "The Solomon Islands has a challenge of starting from a quite high level of malaria and it's a poor country with a weak health system and scattered populations on small islands.

"Sri Lanka has a challenge of still having a war with the Tamil Tigers." The three-day conference at Customs House aims to develop a logistical game plan for attacking malaria to take to Asia-Pacific governments.

The process of dealing with the disease itself is a proven one, Professor Feachem said. "To attack the mosquito we do two things - we make sure everybody is sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net. We want to saturate the community with bed nets and make sure people use them and maintain them," he said. "The second thing we do against the mosquito is to spray an insecticide in the houses. We do that every six months ... and that reduces the mosquito populations."

The other line of attack is against the parasite that causes the infectious disease. "That's just diagnosis and treatment," Professor Feachem said.

"It's a question of gearing up your ability to find the cases, diagnose them and treat them with the right drugs and making sure the drugs are there." Australia, which successfully eliminated malaria in 1982, is the leading player in targeting malaria in the Asia-Pacific region - in terms of both financial clout and scientific resources - but the Brisbane conference has also been backed by the World Health Organisation and the Gates Foundation, which has opened its deep pockets to make global eradication a major priority. "I think it's a conviction from Bill and Melinda (Gates) personally that this is an avoidable and preventable tragedy," Professor Feachem said.

"We have about a million deaths from malaria in the world every year. They're almost all in children and they needn't happen." Bob McMullan, the parliamentary secretary for international development assistance, said the key to tackling malaria across the Asia-Pacific region was learning the lessons of past successes.

"The idea of the network is to get not just the scientists but the practical people who are or have run malaria elimination programs around the region together so that we can make sure that the dollars we are spending on malaria elimination are most effective," Mr McMullan said. "This is a lead we are taking because I think we have got a window of opportunity in terms of global interest and the positive attitude of the governments of, say Vanuatu, which is one of the target countries. "Apart from a humanitarian reason, we want this region in which we live to be stable and prosperous."