The scientific journal The Lancet publishes about the new drug. Malaria is a deadly disease and causes 400,000 deaths in the world every year, according to the World Health Organization.
Many children in Africa in particular die from the effects of malaria.
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Group of children
The new vaccine has been tested on a group of 450 children in Burkina Faso and was found not only to be safe but also ‘highly effective’ in the 12 months after vaccination.
According to the researchers, the new drug appears to be 77 percent effective in children who received a high dose. And in the group of children who received a lower dose, the drug was 71 percent effective. This means it complies with the WHO standard of the World Health Organization. It states that a vaccine is successful at 75 percent effectiveness.
Unknown
The most effective malaria vaccine to date worked for only 55 percent. Researchers therefore call the results ‘unprecedentedly effective’, writes The Lancet.
This is the first study, researchers have to further investigate the drug in follow-up studies.
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Thousands of genes
The first studies of this vaccine started in 2019, even before the coronavirus outbreak. The corona vaccine was developed on the basis of research into malaria.
Why has it still not been possible to develop an effective vaccine against malaria? That’s because technically it’s a very complicated vaccine. There are thousands of genes in malaria, a professor on the research team told the BBC. In comparison: the corona virus contains ‘only’ 12 genes.
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What is Malaria?
Malaria is a disease caused by parasites. The parasites can enter the body through a mosquito bite from the Anopheles mosquito, which mainly lives in the (sub) tropics. In most cases of malaria, patients develop fever, headache, chills and muscle pain on average ten to fourteen days after infection. Some forms of malaria can be fatal within weeks if the infected person is not treated.
Source: RIVM
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