On Friday, a new report showed that worldwide deaths from malaria may be almost twice as high as previously estimated, reported that malaria kills more than 1.2 million people in a year.

A research institute, “Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation”, (IHME) US, said that earlier studies had fail to noticed hundreds of thousands of deaths because they had incorrectly assumed malaria overwhelmingly killed babies and paying their attention only of the findings on under-fives.

Latest study, which published in journal, “The Lancet” found that 42% of deaths were in fact among older children.

IHME researchers used new data and computer modeling to assemble a historical database for malaria between the period of 1980 and 2010, and found that more than 78,000 children aged 5 to 14, and more than 445,000 people aged 15 and older died from malaria in 2010.

This latest findings of the researchers means that more than 4 in 10 of all malaria demises were in people aged 5 years and older.

The study discovered that worldwide the malaria deaths increased from 995,000 in 1980 to a peak in 2004 with 1.8 million, before decreasing again in 2010 to 1.2 million.

While the recent, World Health Organization (WHO) report showed that the estimated number of malaria deaths fell to 655,000 in 2010, which is almost half the number in the IHME study.

WHO said that their figures are correct, added that the latest data available in the Lancet study had been based on verbal testimony by relatives of how people had died, not on labs diagnosis of samples, so they would say that again the huge number of deaths would be in children under 5 year old.

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