Newsrescue
On Monday, Cameroon inaugurated the world’s first malaria vaccination programme for children. Late last year, the Central African country became the continent’s first to get doses of Mosquirix, developed by British pharmaceutical GSK.
Officials have described the campaign as a watershed moment in the continent’s decades-long fight against mosquito-borne sickness, which is responsible for 96% of global malaria deaths, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
According to the World Health Organisation, Cameroon registers over six million malaria infections per year, with the disease killing an estimated 13,839 people in 2021 alone, the vast majority of whom were children under the age of five.
The vaccine will save lives. It will bring significant relief to families and the country’s health system,” said Aurelia Nguyen, chief programme officer at the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), which is assisting Cameroon in obtaining the injections.
The WHO authorised Mosquirix, the trade name for the RTS,S vaccine, in the autumn of 2021, following a pilot programme in 2019 that administered doses to over 800,000 children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.
Cameroon received 331,200 shots in November and plans to vaccinate about 249,133 children aged 0 to 24 months across 42 health districts in all ten regions.
The vaccine provides just approximately 36% immunity and must be provided in four doses, according to GAVI.
The alliance said 19 other African countries – some of which have received shipments of Mosquirix – intend to roll out vaccination programs this year, targeting more than three million children.
Last year, GAVI, WHO, and UNICEF announced that a dozen African countries would receive the vaccine in 18 million doses by 2025.
While GSK has claimed that it can only produce approximately 15 million doses of the shots per year, WHO officials have expressed hope that the release of a second vaccine produced by Oxford University may assist in meeting “high demand” and reaching millions more youngsters.
The low-cost R21/Matrix-M vaccine has apparently been clinically evaluated in the United Kingdom, Thailand, and other African countries, including a phase III trial involving 4,800 children in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. Earlier this year, Ghana became the first country in the world to give regulatory permission for malaria injections in children aged five to 36 months.
