Malaria is one of the most deadly transmittable diseases in the world at the moment. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of it and most of the victims are in Africa and hundreds of millions of people are recorded as being infected with the parasite causing malaria. Child mortality level is dramatic in sub-Saharan Africa and malaria is a main cause. Children die because of malaria at a rate of almost one per minute. An effective malaria vaccine will have long-term consequences for the countries as a whole, because the tropical disease is one of the obstacle against development.
Roughly half of the world’s population, 3.4 billion people, are at risk of suffering from malaria, Newsweek says. The tropical environment fosters widespread dispersion of mosquito carrying the malaria inducing parasite.
Another malaria vaccine has been announced last summer, but not news have arrived about afterwords. Sanaria, a Maryland company, applied for the patents and goes through trials.
The effective malaria vaccine prevented about half of the young children in the trial to get infected
After the recent Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, finally there is a good news regarding epidemics. A new vaccine has been produced by GlaxoSmithKline. Researchers working on the project published their positive results in PLOS Medicine journal. Every medicine needs to pass through extensive trials before being released on the market. This is the first time an anti-malaria vaccine reached such an evolved stage, as GSK applied for regulatory approval.
The latest medical trial involved 1500 infants and children. After 18 months, the researchers returned to the vaccinated children and noticed great results. In the case of young children, the vaccine caused a reduction of the cases by half, while for older children, a quarter of the vaccine recipients did not suffer malaria episodes. The vaccine takes action against the parasite before it multiplies in the liver and returns to the bloodstream, attacking red cells.
Prof Sanjeev Krishna of St George’s University of London, a reviewer of the article published in PLOS Medicine, declared for BBC that the effective malaria vaccine “[…] is a milestone. The landscape of malaria vaccine development is littered with carcasses, with vaccines dying left, right and centre. To get to this stage is very encouraging indeed. We eagerly await the next results to see how long-lasting protection is and whether a booster adds further potential.