The World Health Organization (WHO), on Wednesday, recommended the world’s first vaccine to prevent malaria for widespread use in children, a tool it said can help save tens of thousands of lives every year.
The life-threatening parasitic disease kills more than 400,000 people a year, and the WHO says more than 260,000 of them are African children under age 5. Most cases and deaths caused by the disease, which is transmitted through bites of infected mosquitoes, occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
“This is a historic moment,” WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement.
“The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control.”
The WHO said it is recommending use of the vaccine among children in places with moderate to high malaria transmission. The guidance is based on an ongoing pilot program of the vaccine in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has included more than 800,000 children since 2019. Initial findings from the pilot program conclude that deadly, severe malaria was reduced by 30 percent among vaccinated children. The WHO is recommending that children 5 months old and older receive four doses of the vaccine.
The vaccine can cause mild side effects in some children, including fever and brief convulsions, said Katherine O’Brien, the WHO’s director of immunization, vaccines and biologicals. Officials also plan to keep studying the benefits of the vaccine’s fourth dose to determine whether it is needed, she said at a news conference.
Tedros said he expected the vaccine to add to the progress global health leaders have made since 2000, when malaria deaths were more than twice as high as they are now. But he emphasized that the vaccine should not replace other tools used to fight malaria, including bed nets meant to ward off mosquitoes while people sleep.
“We still have a very long road to travel,” Tedros said Wednesday at a news conference. “But this is a long stride down that road.”
In a statement, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said it welcomes the WHO recommendation. In a statement alongside global health agency Unitaid and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, it said “global stakeholders, including Gavi, will consider whether and how to finance a new malaria vaccination programme for countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Brian Greenwood, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who has played a key role in malaria vaccination trials and research into the vaccine, called it a “historic day for malaria.”
“For the first time we have a vaccine that is now recommended for expanded use in areas of Africa where the disease is endemic,” Greenwood said in a statement. “With malaria still a major cause of death, especially among children in Africa, this decision has the potential to save millions of young lives. We urgently need more tools and innovative, practical solutions to malaria.”
In Malawi, malaria is endemic and is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality, especially in children under 5 and pregnant women and other pregnant individuals, according to the Malawi Ministry of Health.
– The Washington Post