It is called R21 and could be the decisive tool to combat malaria. A disease that kills about 400,000 people every year, mostly children under 5, in sub-Saharan Africa. 25% of the deaths in Nigeria. It could be a turning point, the road is the right one. The new malaria vaccine – the results of which have been published on Lancet but they have not yet been peer-reviewed – it showed 77% effectiveness and was developed by the Jenner Institute of the University of Oxford in collaboration with doctors from Burkina Faso.
The vaccine has been used in 450 children from the African country aged between 5 and 17 months, showing both a good safety and efficacy profile. That 77% effectiveness is the absolute best figure ever achieved so far: the World Health Organization had in fact set the limit for fighting the disease “effectively” at 75%. The next step will be to extend clinical trials on about 5,000 children in four different countries, in addition to Burkina also Mali, Tanzania and Kenya.
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According to the director of the Ouagadougou Institute of Health Sciences, the professor of parasitology Halidou Tinto, the results obtained to date from the serum “are exciting” and have been “well tolerated” by patients. “We can’t wait – he added – to start phase three of the experimentation to obtain data on safety and efficacy on a large scale, which in this region are more necessary than ever”. For UK researchers, R21 has the potential to reduce mortality over the next five years. Pointing, he admits Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute to more ambitious goals “how to completely eradicate malaria”. Once approved, it will be produced by the Serum Institute of India which is already producing the vaccine against Covid 19 AstraZeneca.
The intervention
“The effectiveness of the response against Covid also against HIV, malaria and tuberculosis”
at Peter Sands
In 2020, more than 1,200 people died in the 23 hospitals in Africa where the NGO Doctors with Africa CUAMM operates. The data is contained in a note published by the organization two days after World Malaria Day, which is celebrated on 25 April, with the aim of drawing attention to a disease “now almost unknown in the West, which continues to cause thousands of victims every year in the poorest countries”. The NGO reports in the note a testimony from South Sudan where, it says, “Doctors with Africa CUAMM is carrying out a project that aims precisely at improving the prevention and diagnosis of malaria”. The project, which is called ‘enhancing the response to malaria in South Sudan’, continues the note, is “supported by theItalian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), involves the hospital and 42 peripheral health centers, aiming to strengthen the fight against malaria throughout the territory, providing medicines and tools for the prevention and diagnosis of malaria, but also training local staff and creating teams of health workers of communities able to treat cases of malaria in their own villages “. As part of the project, explains the note,” the development of operational research in the field in collaboration with the University of Pisa is also envisaged, to evaluate the ‘efficiency and improvement fronts of the laboratories that have to perform the tests, improving diagnostics “.
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