In this 2009 photo, a mother holds her baby receiving a malaria vaccine as part of a trial in the west Of Kenya World Health Organization says three Africans Countries have been selected to test the world's first malaria vaccine (Karel Prinsloo / Associated Press) Three African countries have been selected to test the world's first malaria vaccine, the World Health Organization said Monday. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will start piloting the injectable vaccine next year with hundreds of thousands of young children who have had the highest risk of death.
The vaccine, which has partial efficacy, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives if used with existing measures, said the WHO Regional Director for the 39 Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, in a statement. The challenge is whether impoverished countries can deliver the four required doses of vaccine for each child.
Malaria remains one of the most stubborn health problems in the world, infecting more than 200 million people each year and killing about half a million, most of them in Africa. Net and insecticides are the main protection.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected by the disease, with about 90 percent of the world's cases in 2015. Malaria spreads when a mosquito bites some already infected, sucks blood and The parasites, then bites another person.
A global effort to fight malaria resulted in a 62% reduction in deaths between 2000 and 2015, the WHO said. But the UN agency said in the past that these estimates are mainly based on modeling and that data are so bad for 31 African countries - including those who believe they have the worst epidemics - 39 he could not know if the cases were increasing or Over the past 15 years.
The vaccine will be tested on children aged five to 17 months to see if the protective effects they have shown up to now in clinical trials can withstand under real conditions. At least 120,000 children in each of the three countries will receive the vaccine, which has taken decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
Kenya, Ghana and Malawi have been selected for the vaccination pilot because all have strong prevention and vaccination programs, but continue to have a high number of malaria cases, 39 WHO. Countries will deliver the vaccine through their existing immunization programs.
WHO hopes to eradicate malaria by 2040 despite increased resistance problems to drugs and insecticides used to kill mosquitoes.
"The slow progress in this area is astonishing, given that malaria has existed for millennia and has been a major force for human evolutionary selection, shaping the genetic profiles of African populations," Kathryn Maitland, Professor of Infectious Diseases Pediatric tropics At Imperial College London, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in December. "Contrasts this pace of change with our progress in treating HIV, a disease of just over three decades."
The malaria vaccine was developed by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline and the $ 49 million for the first phase of the pilot is funded by the Global Alliance of GAVI Vaccines, UNITAID and the Global Fund to Fight Malaria. AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East also have malaria cases.
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