The World Health Organisation, (WHO), says the only approved vaccine against malaria should be widely given to African children, potentially marking a major advance against a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people annually.
According to Reuters, the WHO recommendation is for RTSS or Mosquirix a vaccine developed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L).
Since 2019, 2.3 million doses of Mosquirix have been administered to infants in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in a large-scale pilot programme coordinated by the WHO. The majority of those whom the disease kills are aged under five.
That programme followed a decade of clinical trials in seven African countries.
This is a vaccine developed in Africa by African scientists and were very proud, according to the WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Using this vaccine in addition to existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year, he added, referring to anti-malaria measures like bed nets and spraying.
Malaria is far more deadly than Covid-19 in Africa. It killed 386,000 Africans in 2019, according to a WHO estimate, compared with 212,000 confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in the past 18 months.
