In a report published online by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the team alleged the Bank concealed its failure to pay promised funds to malaria-hit countries while millions of children died.
Professor Amir Attaran of the Institute of Population Health at the University of Ottawa in Canada and his colleagues have said the Bank got it “dreadfully wrong” when it came to handling malaria.
"They have made decisions which have killed a very large number of children throughout the world," Prof. Attaran said in an interview on Tuesday.
But, Suprotik Basu, a public health specialist on the bank's malaria team rejected the accusation.
“Any insinuation that the bank's support for malaria control in Africa or worldwide has been responsible for the deaths of children is misleading and grotesquely incorrect," he said.
Malaria is a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes which kills more than a million people a year, mostly young children in Africa.
"Medical malpractice”
In 2000, the World Bank promised to lend between US$300 million and US$500 million to fight malaria in Africa but the critics have said only a small fraction of this has actually been paid.
In the Lancet paper, the team also accused the World Bank of "medical malpractice” while funding an obsolete malaria treatment in India.
It blamed the Washington-based fund for purchasing chloroquine, a drug that has encountered huge resistance problems, and using it as a key weapon in an anti-malaria campaign in the subcontinent.
Renewed commitment
World Bank officials responded to the criticism and said the organisation was dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the 500 million people who are afflicted with malaria each year.
The Lancet quoted Jean-Louis Sarbib, of the World Bank, who said it was not easy or even possible sometimes, to determine how much input from a donor has gone into specific activities to control malaria.
"World Bank Group president Paul Wolfowitz has put the full weight of his leadership behind the Bank's renewed commitment to malaria, with a strong emphasis on results," Mr Sarbib said.
The Bank said that despite successes in malaria control in parts of Brazil, Eritrea, India and Vietnam, "the overall efforts by the Bank in malaria control were understaffed and underfunded".
Mr Sarbib added that US$500 million (AU$670.3 million) in new commitments for malaria control in Africa and South Asia were expected in 2006-2008.
But the international team has said the World Bank's program for controlling malaria in 2005-2010 was inadequate to reverse its history of neglect for the disease.
Mr Attaran and his colleagues described the Bank's technical expertise as insufficient and said it was institutionally unsuited to deliver excellence on malaria.
"They simply need to get out of the disease control business," he said.