By Andrew Mayende
Today is World Malaria Day. This disease, for some time now, has been a serious and sometimes fatal disease caused by a parasite that commonly infects a certain type of mosquito which that feeds on human blood. Once infected with malaria, one typically becomes very sick with high fevers, shaking chills, and flu-like illness.
Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that in 2019, 229 million clinical cases of malaria occurred, and 409,000 people died of malaria, most of them children in Africa.
Because malaria causes so much illness and death, the disease is a great drain on many national and individual economies. With Africa being among the most affected continents and its state of poverty being a sad tale, the disease maintains a vicious cycle of disease and poverty that threatens to cripple economies.
Usually, people get malaria by being bitten by a female anopheles mosquito. Only Anopheles mosquitoes can transmit malaria and they must have been infected through a previous blood meal taken from an infected person. When a mosquito bites an infected person, a small amount of blood is taken in which contains microscopic malaria parasites. About 1 week later, when the mosquito takes its next blood meal, these parasites mix with the mosquito’s saliva and are injected into the person being bitten.
Because the malaria parasite is found in red blood cells of an infected person, malaria can also be transmitted through blood transfusion, organ transplant, or the shared use of needles or syringes contaminated with blood. Malaria may also be transmitted from a mother to her unborn infant before or during delivery (“congenital” malaria).
However, there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. A new malaria vaccine has proven to have 77% efficacy in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, this is according to the University of Oxford team behind the research findings.
Despite many vaccines having been tried out over the years, this is the first one to meet the required target. The researchers are optimistic that this vaccine could have a major public health impact.
Having been trialled in 450 children in Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in West Africa that covers an area of around 274,200 square kilometres and is bordered by Mali to the northwest, Niger to the northeast, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, the vaccine was found to be safe, and showed high efficacy levels over 12 months of monitoring.
As part of confirmatory procedures, larger trials in nearly 5,000 children between the ages of five months and three years will now be carried out across four African countries. Halidou Tinto, professor in parasitology and the principal trial investigator at the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro, Burkina Faso, said the results were “very exciting” and showed “unprecedented efficacy levels”. “We look forward to the upcoming ‘phase III’ trial to demonstrate large-scale safety and efficacy data for a vaccine that is greatly needed in this region.”
In Africa, there have been more deaths from malaria than from coronavirus in the past year. With this grim statistics, the success of the malaria vaccine shall definitely be a new dawn in Africa.
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