The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday recommended the use of the first approved vaccine against malaria, a disease that kills more than 400,000 people a year, reported Africa News.
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is a historic moment and that the long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health, and malaria control.
Tedros said the RTS,S/AS01 (RTS,S) malaria vaccine, which is the first for a human parasite, would help to save tens of thousands of young lives. As per WHO data, a child dies of malaria every two minutes.
He said the pilot vaccination program confirmed that the vaccine can be effectively delivered through child health clinics. The vaccine, which has been developed by GSK, is allocated in four doses.
The vaccine has been approved for widespread roll-out after positive results of a pilot program that was deployed in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi since 2019. As part of the pilot program, more than two million doses of the vaccine were administered.
In a statement, the WHO recommended the vaccine should be widely given to children in sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions with moderate to high malaria transmission.
Notably, Malaria is one of the main causes of childhood illness and death in sub-Saharan African countries, where more than 260 000 African children under the age of five die due to malaria every year.
Pedro Alonso, Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme, said this is a massive breakthrough from a scientific perspective.
Kate O’Brien, Director of WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines, and Biologicals, said arranging to fund the malaria vaccine rollout is the next step.
“Then we will be set up for scaling of doses and decisions about where the vaccine will be most useful and how it will be deployed,” the WHO official said.
