Malaria remains one of the world’s leading killers, but a vaccine trial is offering new hope to communities that suffer most from the disease.
Malawi became the first country to implement a pilot program to dispense a malaria vaccine for children last week. Scientists with the U.K.-based GSK pharmaceutical company took 30 years to develop the vaccine. It trains the immune system to attack the malaria parasite, spread by the female Anopheles mosquito.
Malaria remains one of the deadliest diseases in the world, particularly in Africa, where it kills more than 250,000 children annually. Globally, at least one child dies of malaria every two minutes. In Malawi, about 5.9 million people contracted the disease in 2017 out of a population of 18.6 million, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported. The disease costs Africa an estimated $12 billion every year and drains the gross domestic product of countries on the continent by 5 to 6 percent, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Clinical trials showed the vaccine successfully prevented 4 in 10 malaria cases. The numbers are low compared to vaccines for other diseases, but the effort should still provide a needed boost in the fight against malaria. In 2017, cases of the disease continued to rise for the second year in a row after more than a decade of decline. Workers will implement the vaccine alongside other preventive measures, including insecticides and treated bed nets.
“We have seen tremendous gains from bed nets and other measures to control malaria in the last 15 years, but progress has stalled and even reversed in some areas,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general. “We need new solutions to get the malaria response back on track, and this vaccine gives us a promising tool to get there.”
Ghana will also launch the program this week, joined by Kenya in the coming weeks. Each country’s national immunization program will dispense the four-dose treatment to children between the ages of 5 and 18 months. The program will vaccinate about 360,000 children each year in the three countries.
The vaccine received interagency funding from groups like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, Unitaid, and the Seattle-based PATH health group, among others. The health ministries in the three countries will also include it in their routine immunization program. Malawi is deploying it in 11 districts with moderate to high rates of malaria transmission, where the vaccine can have the greatest effect.
One mother, who brought her youngest children to the Mitundu Community Hospital to receive the first dose, said she wanted to ensure her child is protected.
“My husband was diagnosed with malaria, but there was no medication available at the hospital,” said Alinafe Tsitsi. “I was scared for his life. When I found out about the malaria vaccine, I wanted my child to have it.”
Debbie Atherly, head of vaccine policy, access, and delivery at PATH, told me the pilot programs would observe possible challenges, such as whether mothers are able to take their children for all four doses. The long-term goal will focus on providing access to the vaccine in more countries.
“The pilot introductions are meant to last until 2023, but a recommendation for broader use could be made before that,” Atherly said. “Then it would be up to the countries to decide.”
Comments
Laura W
Posted: Sat, 05/04/2019 07:25 amThat is big news about the malaria vaccine. I hope they can get the effectiveness up as testing continues.
cln
Posted: Tue, 05/07/2019 09:01 pmI have known of remedies that were very effective for malaria, risk free, inexpensive and easily available. But not politically acceptable. And that makes all the difference. So sad we are using drugs when we could use safe remedies. So 6 out of 10 get the drug with no effect on malaria, but possibly a harmful effect in other ways.
Bix
Posted: Thu, 05/09/2019 01:39 pmcln,
I would like to hear of those remedies for malaria. I worked as a medical professional in Africa for years, and know of nothing for malaria that is easily used or successful. 1. Bed nets? No, people cook, eat, visit after dark when Anopheles mosquitoes bite, and don't go to bed till later. 2. Pills? Much drug-resistance. 3. Window screens? Way too expensive. 4. Getting rid of standing water? Also very complex and expensive. 4. Topical mosquito repellants? Expensive.
What else??
Bix
cln
Posted: Thu, 05/09/2019 05:37 pmBix. Here is what I remember. Iodine. In one of my classes the instructor talked about it and it's incredible effectiveness but the impossibility of getting it to the people because it would bypass pharma and the politically correct group. Another one is Silver Shield which I remember has been shown to be successful. A product made by Nature's Sunshine and shown to be very effective even on children who were close to death...developed by a leading scientist who worked for the US government at one time. (According to my memory). His name is Dr. Gordon Pederson, a board certified physician in Regenerative Medicine. He wrote, A New Fighting Chance. I think it was take 2 bottles within a 24 hours and it was super effective, but you can read his book. I had a client in Rwanda who got malaria. I had him use a salt remedy and it turned him around almost immediately. I cannot remember exactly what we did but it was external application of a lot of salt. Regarding the silver shield...it would be so cheap for these poor countries to manufacture their own colloidal silver solutions. Far more effective and far safer than antibiotics and useful for many applications where drugs would normally be used. When we have gone to Haiti I tried to implement that idea, but generally people respect and like the idea of western medicine. So it is an uphill battle to go another direction.