Malaria kills 660,000 people a year, most of them children under five years of age in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2007, in order to prevent this disease from being forgotten, the World Health Organization (WHO) established April 25 as Malaria Day. The cause of this infection is a parasite called sporozoite that is transmitted from human to human by the bite of a mosquito. Symptoms appear in 48-72 hours: anemia, bloody stools, convulsions, high fevers or muscle pain.
Malaria vaccine
Since last year, there is new hope for those affected, a recent prototype vaccine that could be 50% effective in children between 5 and 17 months. The only drawback is that for now the effect of the RTS,S vaccine only lasts for a year and a half. The research, in which the Spanish scientist Pedro Alonso has participated, has been tested on 15,000 volunteers and is already in phase III. The driving laboratory, GSK (GlaxoSmith-Kline), will request consent from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for its commercialization and the WHO has stated that it would be willing to endorse it in 2015.
WHO planning
In the last ten years, with the prevention and control measures taken by the WHO, the mortality rate of this condition has been reduced by more than 49% in Africa and by 45% worldwide. Even so, with data from 2012, 90% of deaths occurred in Africa. In addition to these data, every year 3.3 billion people are at risk of contracting the disease. Due to the high cost of the treatment (artemisinin) and the reduced access to health care for people in poor countries, an urgent appeal has been made to raise funds for the fight against the disease. For this reason, since 2013 and for the next few years, the slogan is: “Invest in the future. Beat Malaria.”