Children in Ivory Coast received the first doses of a new, relatively cheap malaria vaccine on Monday, a step that has been hailed as a major milestone in the battle against one of the world\u2019s most deadly diseases. <\/p>\n
The vaccine <\/strong>costs less than $4 a dose, making it \u201crealistic to roll out in many tens of millions of doses from now on,\u201d and it has high efficacy levels of around 75%-80% in young children, Professor Adrian Hill, director\u00a0of the\u00a0Jenner Institute\u00a0at\u00a0Oxford University, who led the development of the vaccine, said in an interview with BBC Radio on Monday. <\/p>\n Up to 500,000 child deaths could be saved every year with the widespread implementation of R21, alongside its counterpart RTS,S vaccine, according to modeling by the World Health Organization (WHO). <\/p>\n Spread by some types of mosquitoes, malaria is preventable and curable but still killed around 608,000 people around the world in 2022, according to WHO. About 95% of those deaths occurred in Africa, where children under the age of 5 account <\/strong>for around 80% of all malaria deaths across the continent. <\/p>\n The SIII has already manufactured more than 25 million doses and has committed to producing up to 100 million doses a year, a scale that allows the vaccine to remain affordable, according to the statement from the University of Oxford. <\/p>\n There are enough doses that 250,000 children under the age of 2 will initially be vaccinated in Ivory Coast, while Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic have all authorized the vaccine, too, the university said. <\/strong> <\/p>\n R21 will be used alongside the RTS,S vaccine, which has already been delivered to more than 2 million children over a four-year pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, where it reduced all-cause mortality by 13%, according to UNICEF. <\/p>\n Both these vaccines have been approved by the WHO and are expected to have a hugely positive impact on public health, alongside other prevention strategies like mosquito nets. <\/p>\n Hill added that there is still \u201ca lot of work for people in-country to get set up, particularly when you\u2019re aiming to distribute millions of doses from this year.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThis is a three-dose vaccine, typically (given at) five, six, seven months of age and then a booster a year later. That\u2019s not a time point that other vaccines are usually given at, so there\u2019s training required in these largely relatively low income countries.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Children in Ivory Coast received the first doses of a new, relatively cheap malaria vaccine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/healthyretirementnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}