3 African Countries Chosen To Test 1st Malaria Vaccine

In this Oct. 30, 2009 photo, a mother holds her baby receiving a new malaria vaccine as part of a trial at the Walter Reed Project Research Center in Kombewa in Western Kenya. The World Health Organization says three African countries have been chosen to test the world's first malaria vaccine. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will begin piloting the injectable vaccine next year with young children. WHO said Monday, April 24, 2017, that the vaccine has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives if used with existing measures. The challenge is whether impoverished countries can deliver the required four doses of the vaccine for each child. (AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

Three African countries have been chosen to test the world's first malaria vaccine, the World Health Organization announced Monday. Ghana, Kenya and Malawi will begin piloting the injectable vaccine next year with young children, who have been at highest risk of death.

Associated Press report continues:

The vaccine, which has partial effectiveness, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives if used with existing measures, the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, said in a statement. 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 hardest hit by the disease, with about 90 percent of the world's cases in 2015. Malaria spreads when a mosquito bites someone already infected, sucks up blood and parasites, and then bites another person.

A global effort to counter malaria has led to a 62 percent cut in deaths between 2000 and 2015, WHO said. But the U.N. agency has said in the past that such estimates are based mostly on modeling and that data is so bad for 31 countries in Africa - including those believed to have the worst outbreaks - that it couldn't tell if cases have been rising or falling in the last 15 years.

The vaccine will be tested on children five to 17 months old to see whether its protective effects shown so far in clinical trials can hold up under real-life conditions. The vaccine has taken decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.

Kenya, Ghana and Malawi were chosen for the vaccine pilot because all have strong prevention and vaccination programs but continue to have high numbers of malaria cases, WHO said. The countries will deliver the vaccine through their existing vaccination programs.

WHO is hoping to wipe out malaria by 2040 despite increasing resistance problems to both drugs and insecticides used to kill mosquitoes.

"The slow progress in this field is astonishing, given that malaria has been around for millennia and has been a major force for human evolutionary selection, shaping the genetic profiles of African populations," Kathryn Maitland, professor of tropical pediatric infectious diseases at Imperial College London, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in December. "Contrast this pace of change with our progress in the treatment of HIV, a disease a little more than three decades old."

The malaria vaccine has been developed by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, and the US$49 million for the first phase of the pilot is being funded by the global vaccine alliance GAVI, UNITAID and Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East also have malaria cases.

First Large-Scale Malaria Vaccine Trials For Africa

A mosquito-borne disease, malaria killed 429,000 people in 2015, 92 percent of them in Africa

AFP reports that a new malaria vaccine will be tested on a large scale in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi, the World Health Organization said Monday, with 360,000 children to be vaccinated between 2018 and 2020.

The injectable vaccine RTS,S could provide limited protection against a disease that killed 429,000 people worldwide in 2015, with 92 percent of victims in Africa and two-thirds of them children under five.

"The prospect of a malaria vaccine is great news. Information gathered in the pilot will help us make decisions on the wider use of this vaccine," said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO's regional director for Africa.

The vaccine should be used alongside other preventative measures such as bed nets, insecticides, repellants and anti-malarial drugs, the WHO said.

"Combined with existing malaria interventions, such a vaccine would have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives in Africa," Moeti said.

The vaccine, also known as Mosquirix, has been developed by the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, and the large-scale three-country pilot will test it on children aged five to 17 months.

The drug passed previous scientific testing -- including a phase three clinical trial between 2009 and 2014 -- and was approved for the pilot programme in 2015.

- 'Huge impact' -

The aim of the trial is to assess the effectiveness of the vaccine as well the feasibility of its delivery to populations at risk as four successive doses must be given on a strict timetable.

The immunization cycle is not in sync with routine childhood inoculations against diseases such as hepatitis, measles and meningitis, with injections required at five months, six months, seven months and two years.

Symptoms of malaria include fever, muscle pain and headache as well as vomiting and diarrhoea.

While RTS,S does not promise full protection against the mosquito-borne disease it is the most effective potential vaccine so far developed, reducing the number of malaria episodes by 40 percent in tests on 15,000 people over five years of clinical trials, and could therefore save hundreds of thousands of lives.

"It's an efficacy rate which is quite low, but given the amount of affected people, the impact will be huge," said Mary Hamel, who is coordinating the vaccine's implementation programme.

"There will be other vaccines and they'll be more efficient, but in the meantime, this will have a significant influence."

Kenya, Ghana and Malawi were selected for the trial because malaria rates are high and they have a long history of use of bed nets and other interventions.

The large-scale pilot is the latest step in decades of work seeking to eradicate malaria with the numbers dying falling nearly two-thirds since the turn of the century.