A NEW DAWN FOR FIGHT AGAINST MALARIA IN THE AFRICAN REGION

Abstract

The WHO Regional Office for Africa is systematically taking steps to realize the goals of malaria control in the Region. One of such steps is the pursuit for the development of malaria vaccine, which is being tested in three countries in the Region, namely Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. This paper reviews the potential contributions of a vaccine against malaria in endemic regions like sub-Saharan Africa beyond just coming as another intervention for malaria control. The injectable vaccine, RTS,S, was developed to protect young children from the most deadly form of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, which is endemic in the Region. However, sceptics argued that this could be unlikely outside of rigorously controlled clinical trials, as well as waning efficacy over time. There has been calls for cautious optimism and emphasized that “the vaccine is just an additional tool in the current limited armamentarium for making progress against malaria”. This review demonstrates the benefits of having the malaria vaccine are numerous, including strengthening national immunization and malaria control programmes; stimulating and boosting the scale-up of the existing interventions which have so far made significant reductions in malaria burden across several countries of the region.