This groundbreaking vaccine “could save tens of thousands of young lives each year,” according to the World Health Organization.
There are over 229 million cases of malaria per year, 94% of them taking place in Africa. Almost 410,000 people die each year from the more than 10 strains of the virus which are carried by mosquitoes in tropical areas.
Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved a malaria vaccine. The vaccine is shown to prevent 4 out of 10 cases and 3 out of 10 severe cases. Although it has a prevention rate of 40%, the vaccine is still a remarkable success in medicine.
The British pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), developed the vaccine called RTS,S, or Mosquirix, to reduce the transmission of childhood malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, the place most affected by the virus.
Even though GSK has headquarters in the UK, WHO Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says that “the vaccine was developed in Africa by African scientists and we’re very proud.”
The vaccine comes after almost 30 years of trial and error, from the formulation of the vaccine to the “pivotal long-term clinical trials,” as detailed in GSK’s Malaria vaccine report. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrates that after three years of vaccine dosage and antimalarial medicine, hospitalizations and clinical malaria episodes decreased by almost 70%.
Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi have already started distributing the vaccine. More than 800,000 people have received at least one vaccine dose, and more than 2.3 million have been administered in the region.
Malaria is a dangerous disease, transmitted by the bite of a mosquito. The female Anopheles mosquito is the vector of disease, most commonly found in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa. These insects carry a type of Plasmodium parasite which then spreads to the infected.
Symptoms usually occur 10-15 days after first exposure to the parasite, with fever, headache, and chills being the earliest onset. If not found and treated within 24 hours, the virus slowly becomes incurable and progresses to severity.
Some people are at more of a risk of contracting the disease than others, as they have a weaker immune system. Children under the age of 5, pregnant women (or women in the postpartum stage), and people diagnosed with HIV-AIDS or other auto-immune diseases all have a higher risk of contracting a severe illness.
Children are especially susceptible to malaria complications in the early stages of their lives. In fact, of 409,000 malaria deaths, 274,000 were kids under the age of five.
Because of this severe illness pool, RTS,S is being distributed to children first, as detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine study stated previously. The trial studied 6861 children from the ages of 5-17 months and randomly divided them into groups to receive three different variations of the vaccine, or antimalarial medicine.
2287 children received antimalarial medicine (also called chemoprevention) alone, while 2288 children received the vaccine alone. The rest of the children (2286) received both the chemoprevention and the vaccine, proving to be the most effective mechanism to prevent malaria related symptoms and deaths.
Another malaria vaccine, called R21/Matrix-Mthat, has been created by Oxford University’s team of scientists and researchers in the UK. While the vaccine is still in its first year of testing, early results are promising with the efficacy of almost 77%.
With advancements in scientific and technological knowledge, the malaria vaccine demonstrates a great determination of health professionals to formulate, test, and distribute vaccines for life-threatening diseases. This latest vaccine injects hope into the minds of the hundreds of thousands of lives saved and the millions more waiting for a treatment for their respective afflictions.
