2023-10-06 23:29:02
The World Health Organization (WHO) approved the use in children of a second vaccine against malaria, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
“As a malaria researcher, I dreamed of the day when we would have a safe and effective vaccine against malaria. Now we have two,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO, declared at a press conference.
“I am very pleased to announce that the WHO recommends a second vaccine called R21/Matrix-M to prevent malaria in children at risk of contracting the disease,” he said.
Malaria continues to be a threat, especially for African children, and in 2021 it caused the death of 619,000 people in the world, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization.
Other WHO experts are evaluating manufacturing modalities and other regulatory aspects, explained the director of the WHO’s department of immunization and vaccines, Kate O’Brien.
When all permissions are obtained, the UN children’s agency (Unicef) and the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi) will be able to administer the vaccines, developed by the University of Oxford and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.
Its use is already authorized in Ghana, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
A “big step forward”
In 2021, another vaccine, “RTS,S”, produced by British pharmaceutical giant GSK, became the first vaccine recommended by WHO to prevent malaria in children in areas where transmission is moderate or high.
Tedros assured that “the demand for the RTS,S vaccine far exceeds the supply.”
The R21/Matrix-M vaccine is, according to him, “an extra essential tool to protect more children, faster”, to “get closer to our vision of a malaria-free future”.
The two vaccines have similar efficacy rates, around 75% when administered under the same conditions.
A dose of R21/Matrix-M costs between $2 and $4, Tedros said.
Thus, it constitutes a “very big step forward” for dozens of countries, said O’Brien.
Transmitted by mosquitoes
Pilot programs for the introduction of “RTS,S” in three African countries – Ghana, Kenya and Malawi – have allowed more than 1.7 million children to receive at least one dose of the vaccine since 2019.
The implementation of anti-malaria vaccination in these three countries caused a substantial drop in severe and fatal forms of malaria and a decrease in infant mortality.
According to the WHO, when administered on a large scale, it could save tens of thousands of lives each year.
Last July, WHO, UNICEF and Gavi jointly announced the allocation of 18 million doses of this antimalarial vaccine to 12 African countries in 2023-2025.
The disease is caused by a tiny parasite of the genus Plasmodium, transmitted by mosquito bites, which causes fever, headache and chills, becoming a serious condition, even fatal, in the absence of treatment.
For this reason, Professor Megan Greischar of Cornell University in the United States emphasizes that a vaccine will not be enough to eradicate the disease.
“In areas where malaria is common, mosquito resistance to insecticides and parasite resistance to drugs erode progress in public health and make existing tools less effective,” he stressed, although he qualified that “having one more vaccine in the toolbox is good news.”
In addition, the WHO also presented new recommendations on vaccines against dengue and meningitis, in addition to a simplification of the recommendations for the anti-Covid vaccine.
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