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The United Nations announced on Wednesday the imminent scale-up of malaria vaccination across Africa, after a first shipment of doses arrived in Cameroon.
As of 2019, more than two million children have been jabbed in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in a pilot phase, resulting in significant reductions in severe malaria disease and hospitalizations.
Now the program is moving to a wider rollout, with 331,200 doses of RTS,S – the first anti-malaria vaccine recommended by the UN’s World Health Organization – landing on Tuesday in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde.
The handover “means that the scale-up of malaria vaccination in the highest-risk areas on the African continent will begin soon,” the WHO, the UN children’s agency UNICEF and the Gavi vaccine alliance said in a joint statement.
They called it “a historic step toward more widespread vaccination against one of the deadliest diseases for African children.”
Another 1.7 million doses are scheduled for delivery to Burkina Faso, Liberia, Niger and Sierra Leone in the coming weeks.
Several African countries are completing preparations to introduce the malaria vaccine into routine immunization programs, with the first doses scheduled to be administered in January-March 2024.
Africa accounted for about 95 percent of global malaria cases and 96 percent of associated deaths from the mosquito-borne disease in 2021.
Global malaria deaths fell slightly to 619,000 in 2021 – of which 77 percent were children under the age of five. Meanwhile, global malaria cases rose slightly to 247 million.
The RTS,S vaccine works against plasmodium falciparum – the world’s deadliest malaria parasite and the most prevalent in Africa.
It is given in a four-dose schedule starting at around five months of age.
“Widespread implementation of malaria vaccination in endemic areas has the potential to be a game-changer for malaria control efforts and could save tens of thousands of lives each year,” the joint statement said.
Doses are provided by the manufacturer GSK.