New Delhi: The World Health Organisation announced on Tuesday that Malawi is launching a pilot program of the world’s first malaria vaccine to be administered to children below the age of two. The program is also scheduled to be rolled out in Ghana and Kenya later this year.
The vaccine, called Mosquirix, was developed by the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and has been in the works for over 30 years. It “is the first, and to date the only, vaccine that has demonstrated it can significantly reduce malaria in children” according to the WHO.
GSK is donating about 10 million doses of the product for the pilot, which was created in 1987 and subsequently developed with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2014, the vaccine cleared phase III clinical trials that certified that it was both effective and safe for use in humans.
The vaccine has, however, faced severe criticism from experts who have argued that the low levels of protection provided by the vaccine are only short-term and that it is not prudent to spend millions of dollars on it.
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In clinical trials, the vaccine was found to prevent approximately four in ten malaria cases, including three in ten cases of life-threatening malaria, according to WHO. In comparison, the success rates of vaccines for other childhood diseases like measles and chickenpox are 97% and 85% respectively.
The vaccine is designed to be a complementary malaria control tool. It will be added to the core package of the WHO-recommended measures for malaria prevention, which include the routine use of insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor spraying with insecticides and timely malaria testing and treatment.
A clinical trial of another malaria vaccine, PfSPZ, developed by a US biotech firm named Sanaria in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, is scheduled to begin next year. Like Mosquirix, it attacks the first stage of malaria called the pre-erythrocytic and may quench the disease before symptoms show.
But unlike Mosquirix, which is made of proteins from the parasite’s surface, PfSPZ uses consists of sporozoites, young forms of the malarial parasite that have been weakened by irradiation. The cost of acquiring these sporozoites together with other technologies used in its manufacture make it expensive and impractical for a disease that affects the world’s poorest people.
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Malaria risk in India
Malaria is a potentially life-threatening parasitic disease caused by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. In 2017, it was estimated that 435,000 deaths had occurred due to malaria of which 93% were in Africa.
While the World Malaria Report 2018 stated that the world was seeing an “unprecedented period of success in global malaria control”, it also said that progress in terms of eradicating the disease had “stalled”.
India, which makes up for 4% of the world’s malaria cases, ranks high on the list of countries with a significant malaria burden and was included as the only non-African country in a list of 11 countries under special focus by the WHO Malaria report. The report also drew attention to an impressive 24% reduction in malaria cases, about three million, in India.