On Friday, 13th September 2019, the World’s first malaria vaccine is being rolled out in eight of the forty-seven counties of Kenya as reported by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The vaccine will be added to the routine vaccination schedule and more than 300,000 children are expected to receive the vaccine within the span of three years.
Also, the Malaria vaccine has been 30 years in the making and was already run-tested on some children in Ghana and Malawi sometime in April 2019.
The trial was successful as it boosts the immune system to attack plasmodium parasite responsible for malaria disease.
Accordingly, a child will need four doses of the vaccine before reaching two years of age.
It prevents malaria in four out of 10 cases and has been found to reduce the most severe cases of malaria by more than one quarter.
It can be recalled that Malaria kills one child globally every two minutes.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that more than 400,000 people die globally because of the disease each year, most of them in an underdeveloped and developing country, especially in Africa.
In a disclosure made by Wekesa Masasabi, the Director-General of Kenya’s Health Ministry where he was quoted saying "We still have an incidence of 27% (malaria infection) for children under the age of five...,”.
Masasabi added that the vaccine had become a necessity as other measures such as the use of mosquito nets had not helped to eliminate the disease over the years.
Adding that, clinical trials have already proven the malaria vaccine safe and effective.
