Arthur Greene
In an historic day for medicine, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has approved the world’s first malaria vaccine, completing a process which first began in 1907.
In the coming years, the Mosquirix vaccine will be rolled out to millions of children across Africa, who bear the burden of a disease which has plagued humanity for millenia.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, said: “Today is that day. An historic day. Today the WHO recommended the broad use of the world’s first malaria vaccine.”
He added that it will save “tens of thousands of young lives” every year.
Mosquirix was developed by the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and has already been administered to more than 800,000 children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in a trial programme which began in 2019.
The trial, which is ongoing, found the vaccine had no negative impact on other measures to prevent malaria.
The real-world test of the jab showed it prevented 30% of severe cases of malaria.
In 2019, 409,000 people died of malaria, 95% percent of whom were from Africa.
Most of those who succumbed to the disease were children under the age of five. The disease kills one child every two minutes.
The countries worst impacted by the disease include Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Burkina Faso.
Malaria is less prevalent in South Africa, where there are only about 10,000 to 30,000 notified cases per year.
The disease is mainly transmitted along the border regions, such as Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal.
The WHO has feared that Covid-19 has disrupted the world’s – and particularly Africa’s – fight against malaria. The global pandemic has disrupted services which were in place to treat the disease.
Now, however, there is renewed hope that the tide has turned against the mosquito-borne disease.
Mosquirix will be administered in four doses from the age of five months.
Image source: @nytimes
