Kenya yesterday added the world’s first malaria vaccine to its routine immunization schedule for children under two, becoming the third African nation to roll out the vaccine for a disease that kills one child globally every two minutes.
Malaria is a top killer of children under five in the East African nation and the vaccine is critically important to its efforts to combat the disease, because other measures such as mosquito nets have not proven adequate, Kenyan Ministry of Health Director-General Wekesa Masasabi said.
“We still have an incidence of 27 percent [malaria infection] for children under five,” Masasabi said before the launch of the vaccine in the western county of Homa Bay.
The Homa Bay program is the government’s first step toward creating awareness of the new vaccine, he said.
Ghana and Malawi launched their programs earlier this year.
Kenya plans to roll out the vaccine to eight of its 47 counties over the next two years, Masasabi said.
Malaria can be eradicated within a generation, global health experts said in a major report last weekend that was commissioned by The Lancet.
The report contradicted the conclusions last month of a malaria review by the WHO, and its experts urged the WHO not to shy away from this “goal of epic proportions”
Malaria in 2017 infected about 219 million people, killing about 435,000 of them, the vast majority babies and children in the poorest parts of Africa.
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