Cameroon is the first country to have launched a large-scale vaccination program against malaria, in a step that the World Health Organization (WHO) has defined as “historic”. According to the WHO, the mosquito-borne disease kills more than 600,000 people a year, mostly in Africa, with children under 5 accounting for more than 80% of deaths on the continent.
The first to have been immunized is little Noah Ngah, 6 months old, in a hospital in the city of Soa, 20 kilometers from the capital Yaoundé. It is one of many vaccination centers in 42 districts considered priority within the African nation, which has around 28 million inhabitants.
The government said the vaccine will be provided free of charge and systematically to all children under 6 months along with other mandatory or recommended immunizations. In 2024, twenty African countries plan to introduce the vaccine into their childhood immunization programs to reach up to 80-100 million doses each year by 2030.
“Finally this new vaccine has a much more marked efficacy than the others, it exceeds 50%. It may seem like a low percentage, but if we consider the 600 thousand deaths per year from malaria it means saving the lives of thousands and thousands of children The anti-malarial vaccination campaign in Cameroon is therefore of enormous importance and must be extended as much as possible”, explained Carlo Federico Perno, head of Microbiology and Immunology Diagnostics of the Child Jesus.
“This disease involves violent anemization linked to the replication of the malaria plasmodium which destroys the red blood cells, the liver and gives other symptoms from which there is no escape. We have been trying to formulate vaccines against this pathology for more than 70 years, but due to the poor immunogenicity (intrinsic characteristics) of the malaria plasmodium (especially Plasmodium falciparum, against which the vaccine is directed) these vaccines have little or no efficacy”, recalls Perno. “This program also teaches – he concludes – that even in our latitudes without vaccines we are lost: vaccines are a preventive weapon that has changed the history of humanity. If today we live long and with low mortality it is because the mass vaccinations have preserved us. It is good to always remember the value of vaccines, an unparalleled prevention system against infectious diseases, especially in a historical moment in which they seem to be considered more for their toxicity than for their effectiveness.” From 2019 , nearly 2 million at-risk children were vaccinated against malaria in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in an experimental program. The use of the vaccine has led to a substantial drop in serious hospitalizations and a 13% drop in infant deaths.
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