THE TRIAL OF the first vaccine against malaria has shown its recipients were half as likely to contract the disease compared with those in the control group.
The year-long trial, which involved 15,000 African children under the age of 18 months, has been hailed as a significant breakthrough in the fight to eradicate one of the world’s most deadly diseases. The researchers, who came from Africa, Europe and the US, made public their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine last Tuesday.
“These initial results show that RTS,S/AS01 reduces malaria by half in children aged five-17 months during the 12 months after vaccination and that it has the potential to have an important impact on the burden of malaria in young African children,” they wrote on the journal’s website.
The ground-breaking trial, which tested one of two malaria vaccines being developed at the moment, was conducted in seven African countries on two age groups of children: babies between six and 12 weeks old, and babies from five to 17 months old.
After 12 months of the trial, there were about half the number of cases of malaria in the older group of children injected with the vaccine, compared with those in a control group who received vaccines against illnesses such as polio. The results from the younger group of children have yet to be finalised, but they are also believed to be promising.
Lead scientist in the vaccine trials that took place in Ghana, Tsiri Agbenyega, told reporters: “We would have wished that we could wipe it out, but I think this is going to contribute to the control of malaria rather than wiping it out.”
The RTS,S study was funded by GSK, the Path Malaria Vaccine Initiative, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides a grant.
News of the vaccine breakthrough also coincided with an announcement by the World Health Organisation that malaria deaths worldwide have fallen by 20 per cent in the past decade.
About 225 million people get malaria every year, which leads to about 800,000 deaths. The majority of those who die are children from sub-Saharan African.