331,200 doses of the malaria vaccine produced by British pharmaceutical company GSK were delivered late on Tuesday to Yaounde’s Nsimalen International Airport, making Cameroon the first nation in Africa to receive a sizable shipment of the vaccine after it was approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the autumn of 2021.
The first malaria vaccine in history, RTS,S, is marketed under the trade name Mosquirix. 2019 saw the initiation of a trial programme that provided dosages to over 800,000 children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.
The WHO estimates that there were 247 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2021, resulting in 619,000 fatalities; children under the age of five accounted for 77% of those who perished from the infection. About 95% of malaria cases worldwide and 96% of deaths from the disease occurred in Africa in that particular year.
The first consignment of vaccines, according to Cameroonia’s Health Minister Manaouda Malachie, will be given out in 42 of the 203 districts in the nation that are most severely hit by the illness. He has said that only kids between the ages of six and twenty-four months will receive the injections.
Malachie stated, “We lose newborns in particular, and Cameroon is one of 11 countries that still has a fairly heavy burden in terms of mortality linked to malaria.”
“Cameroon is celebrating the first vaccination dose; there will be a gradual increase in the number of doses.” There will be roughly 4 million this year, 6 million the following year, and 8 million the year after, according to the health minister. “This sickness claims the lives of many of our fellow citizens. We now have a vaccine that complements the array of interventions already implemented, he continued.
“The game in our fight against malaria is changed,” according to Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. She went on to say that introducing the Mosquirix vaccination is “like adding a star player to the pitch.”
The World Health Organisation (WHO), UNICEF, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) announced in July that 12 African countries would get 18 million doses of the malaria vaccine between 2023 and 2025. Aside from Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, they include Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Uganda.
1.7 million doses of the vaccine will soon be distributed to Burkina Faso, Liberia, Niger, and Sierra Leone, according to a UNICEF study. According to the organisation, “the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria, infects over 2 billion people worldwide. The disease is transmitted to humans through the bites of female Anopheles mosquitoes.”
