Malaria Vaccines: Here’s to Another Life-Saver

Published 2 years ago
KENYA-HEALTH-MALARIA

A vaccine that has taken almost three decades to produce is finally ready to give hope to thousands affected by malaria.

BY PAULA SLIER AND SASHA STAR

NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT THE last 18 months would have been defined by a virus that caused the world to quite literally shut down. As the infection rate rose by the hour, talk turned to vaccines and scientists raced to create an agent that would provide the global population with a chance of survival.

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With the number of fatalities increasing, it seemed as though the immunity-boosting serum could not come quick enough. It took less than a year for the Covid-19 vaccine to be developed, with more than half of the world’s citizens having already received at least one dose.

Now, a completely different vaccine, which has taken almost three decades to produce, is finally ready to give hope to hundreds of thousands of people affected by another deadly illness. For the very first time, the World Health Organization (WHO) has endorsed a vaccine to fight malaria — a disease that claims the lives of 400,000 people annually.

“We’ve reached a point where [the death rate] has plateaued for the last six years, but we have not seen progress in Africa against malaria with 260,000 children still dying every year. It’s just unacceptable,” says Dr Mary Hamel, the team lead for the WHO’s Malaria Vaccine Implementation Program.

A pilot initiative in Ghana, Malawi and Kenya that began in 2019 showed that RTS,S/AS01, under the brand name Mosquirix, has the ability to reduce the risk of severe malaria by up to 40%. The GlaxoSmithKline-manufactured drug does so by targeting the malaria parasite during the brief time that it exposes itself to the body’s immune system.

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“Trying to develop a vaccine for a parasite is a lot more complex than for a virus,” explains Dr Jaishree Raman who heads the Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring Unit at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). “Malaria parasites either hide in a red blood cell or in liver cells, so there’s a very short period in which a vaccine can attack it.”

The effects of malaria are not pleasant. Fever, vomiting and fatigue are common, while the worst cases result in fatalities. The majority of children who grow up in high-risk areas will contract malaria once a month until they build up enough partial immunity to be infected by the disease without displaying symptoms. Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, is set to meet in December to discuss the roll-out of the jabs in low-income countries.

These countries will then be expected to apply for funding to introduce the vaccine as part of their healthcare system to ensure that children receive the required four doses between the ages of five- and 17-months.

“When I initially went to Kenya as a young doctor in 1995,” Hamel recalls, “the first thing I was asked by the village elders is, ‘when are we going to get a vaccine’? People trust vaccines, people know they save lives. And everyone has felt the pain of malaria. Everyone, including me, knows somebody close to them who has lost a child from malaria.”

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While the introduction of a vaccine after so many years is a clear sign of progress, Raman has warned that regular preventative protocols like bed nets still need to be followed.

“This is not the silver bullet, it’s just an additional tool. And if people start feeling sick, they need to get treatment as soon as possible.” Living through a pandemic for the past year and a half has been traumatic for a number of reasons, but one good thing has come from it, in Hamel’s opinion.

“I think we’ve learned from Covid and the Covid vaccine that if the international community comes together, we can make things happen. We can make sure that supply is increased, and that people are reached with a life-saving intervention.”

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