The Kenyan government on Friday added the world’s first malaria vaccine to the routine immunization schedule for children under two, reported Reuters. Kenya is the third African country after Ghana and Malavi to roll out the vaccine for the disease that kills one child globally every two minutes.
In an interview with Reuters, Wekesa Masasabi, the director-general of Kenya’s health ministry, said Malaria is a top killer of children under five in the East African nation. He added that the vaccine is critically important to combat the disease as other measures such as mosquito nets have not proven adequate.
“We still have an incidence of 27% (malaria infection) for children under five,” Masasabi said before Friday’s launch of the vaccine in the western county of Homa Bay.
He said the Homa Bay programme was the government’s first step toward creating awareness of the new malaria vaccine.
Ghana and Malawi implemented the pilot programmes of the vaccine earlier this year in April. Masasabi said Kenya plans to roll out the vaccine to eight of its 47 counties over the next two years.
According to a statement released by the Kenyan health ministry, the vaccine will be rolled out in Homa Bay, before proceeding to Kisumu, Migori, Siaya, Busia, Bungoma, Vihiga and Kakamega. It said that the vaccine will be incorporated into the national immunization schedule and will be given to children at the ages of six, seven, nine and 24 months.
For proper protection, the health ministry asked the people to get their child all the four vaccine doses and continue to make them sleep under a mosquito net every night.
Around 219 million people were infected by malaria in 2017. The disease killed around 435,000 of them, the vast majority of babies and children in the poorest parts of Africa. Notably, due to ongoing transmission, half the world’s population is still at risk of contracting malaria.
