African test for malaria vaccine

THREE African countries have been chosen to test the world’s first malaria vaccine, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced yesterday.

Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will begin piloting the vaccine next year with hundreds of thousands of children who have been at the highest risk of death.

The injectable vaccine, which has partial effectiveness, could save tens of thousands of lives if used with existing measures, said the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti. The challenge is whether impoverished countries can deliver the required four doses of the vaccine for each child.

Malaria remains one of the world’s most stubborn health challenges, infecting more than 200 million people every year and killing about half a million, most of them children in Africa. Bed netting and insecticides are the chief protection.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the hardest hit by the disease, with about 90% of the world’s cases in 2015. A global effort to counter malaria led to a 62% cut in deaths between 2000 and 2015, WHO said. But the UN agency has said in the past that such estimates were based mostly on modelling, and data was so bad for 31 countries in Africa – including those believed to have the worst outbreaks – that it couldn’t tell if cases had been rising or falling in the past 15 years.

The vaccine will be tested on children 5 to 17 months old to see whether its protective effects shown so far in clinical trials can hold up under real-life 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 rand to develop.

Kenya, Ghana and Malawi were chosen for the pilot because all had strong prevention and vaccination programmes but continued to have high malaria incidence, WHO said.