The World Health Organization has announced that it is ready to test the first malaria vaccine in the real world setting in 2018.
The aim of the testing will be to ascertain whether the vaccine will work under real world circumstances or not. Kenya, Ghana and Malawi have been chosen for taking part in the pilot project.
The vaccine, RTS,S, also known as Mosquirix, was produced by GlaxoSmithKline in 1987 in a public-private partnership with the PATH Malaria Initiative and with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 2015, the vaccine received approval from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
For the next four years (2017-2021), the vaccine will be administered to children between 5 and 17 months in Kenya, Ghana and Malawi.
The vaccine will be given four times and will be administered by an intramuscular injection.
The RTS, S vaccine works by targeting the liver phase of the malaria parasite’s life cycle as the parasite multiplies inside the liver after getting introduced into the body by a mosquito bite.
It has taken about 30 years for the creation of the vaccine to the approval of pilot programme in 2017.
Only five species of Plasmodium parasite spread malarial parasite worldwide.
Need
According to WHO, malaria kills one child every two minutes and has killed 429,000 people in 2015.
According to the WHO World Malaria Report 2016, Nigeria suffers most malaria deaths worldwide (26%), followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (10%), India (6%), and Mali (5%).
African continent suffers the most mosquito-borne ailments and there still exists gaps in prevention coverage as many people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to mosquito protection like bed nets or bug spray.
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