According to a group of health experts, the World Bank published bogus financial and statistical accounts and squandered money on useless malaria treatment. The World Bank says the accusations are unfounded. The World Bank, with an annual budget of $20 billion, is the world's major aid organisation which focuses on eradicating poverty.

The report appears in the journal The Lancet.

The authors of the accusation, Amir Attaran (University of Ottawa, Canada) and colleagues say that since 2000, the World Bank has:

-- Hidden how much it spends on malaria

-- Not kept its promise of $300-500 million for malaria control in Africa

-- Reduced its number of malaria experts from 7 to zero not long after pledging to focus more on the disease

-- Exaggerated its performance by inventing bogus epidemiological statistics

-- Backed treatments in India which The World Health Organization said were obsolete and should not be done

The report suggests that as the World Bank has no experts left, it should hand over $1 billion to other organisations which do have them, such as the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM).

The report says that the World Bank claimed it reduced malaria deaths in the Indian states of Gujarat by 58%, Maharashtra by 98% and Rajasthan by 79%. Amir Attaran and colleagues doubted this could be done, and so quickly. They asked the World Bank to show them the data, but it refused to cooperate. So they asked Indian authorities for data, which was sent to them from India's malaria progamme. The data showed that the opposite had happened - malaria had actually risen in those three states during the exact period the World Bank said incredible reductions had been achieved.

As the writers were not able to look at the World Bank's data, they cannot verify whether it was just a statistical error or just lies.

Even though the World Bank has accepted that it should have done more, Jean Louis Sarbib, World Bank, has challenged the charges made against them. The World Bank says it is seeking funding for health-systems which directly improve outcomes. Regarding the obsolete malaria treatment it funded in India - the one The World Health Organization said it should not back - the World Bank says it was a country-led strategy that tailored drug-treatment policies for different regions of the country. The World Bank says India does not benefit from a one-size-fits-all policy.

Malaria accounts for 10% of Africa's disease burden. Malaria is responsible for $12 billion in lost productivity in Africa.

The World Bank aims to halve malaria deaths by 2010. This aim was declared in 2000.

Many people have written to blog wondering how the World Bank can do anything about malaria if it has got rid of all its experts.