The WHO has recommended a second malaria vaccine for children which is already approved for use in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria https://t.co/YsWvRE8BRe pic.twitter.com/Rii4hXGgHj
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 2, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended a second malaria vaccine, a decision that could offer countries a cheaper and a more readily available option than the world’s first shot against the parasitic disease. The R21/Matrix-M, developed by Britain’s Oxford University, can be used to curb the life-threatening disease spread to humans by some mosquitoes, the WHO said on Monday.
Oxford University developed the new three-dose vaccine with help from the Serum Institute of India. Research has suggested it is more than 75 percent effective and protection is maintained for at least another year with a booster.
wow. 75 percent effective with a shot...or a series of shots.
But when I checked the article about the vaccine in Lancet, I have questions:
vaccine efficacy against clinical malaria was 36% in infants aged 5–17 months and 26% in infants aged 6–12 weeks after four doses of the vaccine.
italics mine.
I posted more from the Lancet article on my medical blog.
given the problem of resistance of the Falciparum malaria to drugs, and the problem of cerebral malaria which kills children, it is a start.
But the vaccine should be considered as still experimental. The numbers in the study used to approve of the vaccine were low (400).
And the vaccine is imperfect in it's prevention of malaria, (some of those getting the vaccine did get malaria anyway, but a lot fewer of them got Malaria, and they had fewer episodes of disease than those who got placebo).
the problem? If your kid got all those shots, but came down with Malaria anyway, parents might come to the conclusion it doesn't work at all.
And of course, the lesson we learned in the Philippines after the Dengue Vaccine debacle in the Philippines, is if parents see a problem with the vaccine they might stop getting any vaccine for their kids, and kids will die of ordinary childhood diseases that are prevented with these vaccines that have been around for 50 years or even longer and essentially eliminated diseases like measles, whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, but which popped up to kill kids here in the Philippines after their parents stopped getting shots for their kids.
so if I lived in west Africa, would I have my kids get the vaccines? Yes. I saw cases of children dying of cerebral malaria and many sick from malaria when I worked there. And despite being on preventive medicine, I came down with a case of FMalaria, which even then was developing resistance to medicines.
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