The WHO recommends the world's first malaria vaccine, saying the shots could 'save tens of thousands of young lives each year'

• The World Health Organization recommended rolling out the world's first malaria vaccine Wednesday.
• A pilot program in Africa showed four doses of the shot reduces the risk of getting malaria by 40%.
• Malaria kills 400,000 people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. A majority of deaths occur in children under 5.

The World Health Organization has recommended a global rollout of the world's first malaria vaccine.

Named RTS,S, or Mosquirix, the vaccine has been more than 30 years in the making. Created by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 1987, it was subsequently developed and tested with support and funding from PATH, a Seattle-based global health group, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to clinical data, the vaccine prevents four in 10 cases of malaria and three in 10 cases of severe, life-threatening malaria - which should require hospitalization - among children between the ages of 5 months and 17 months at least four years after vaccination. (Children under age 5 are the most vulnerable to this illness; a majority of annual malaria deaths occur among individuals in this age group.)

"Using this vaccine in addition to existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year," WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference Wednesday, adding that the shot "changes the course of public health history."

The agency said its recommendation is based on an ongoing pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi that has vaccinated more than 800,000 children with RTS,S since 2019. Results from the program reflect similar vaccine effectiveness in the real world - reducing the risk of getting malaria by 40%, and risk of needing hospitalization due to severe malaria by 30%, STAT reported.

The first-ever vaccine against a human parasite

RTS,S is a four-dose vaccine. During the WHO pilot program, children in the three African countries recieved their first dose when they were either five or six months old, then recieved their second and third doses at monthly intervals after that. Then they got the fourth dose near their second birthday.

According to STAT, concerns over whether parents would bring their children into clinics to receive all four doses - particularly the delayed dose, which needs to be administered more than a year after the first three - prompted the WHO's scientific advisers to suggest the pilot program before recommending a broad rollout.

But Tedros said the program's results over the last two year indicate that "community demand for the vaccine is strong" and shots readily reach children at high coverage levels.

Malaria is a disease caused by various Plasmodium parasites that get transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes. Infected patients experience fever, chills, abdominal pain, vomiting, joint pain, and fatigue between one and two weeks after being bitten. If some infections are not treated within 24 hours of the first symptoms, a person can develop severe malaria.

Individuals with severe illness have a 90% risk of dying if they do not seek medical care. That risk drops to 20% for hospitalized patients.

The RTS,S vaccine is the first shot that targets a human parasite. It is also the first malaria vaccine that's advanced to Phase 3 clinical trials and considered by the WHO for a pilot program.

GlaxoSmithKline's clinical trials, which tested the shot on 15,500 participants (including 9,000 children between 5 and 17 months) in seven African countries between 2009 and 2014, showed a four-dose vaccine regimen would avert 484 malaria deaths per 100,000 children vaccinated. The vaccine was also 36% effective against malarial infection over 4 years of follow-up.

'Its value will be felt most in Africa'

Preventive malarial treatment for developing fetuses during pregnancy, prompt treatment of confirmed cases with anti-malarial medicines, and insecticides and nets around beds to deter mosquitoes have all helped halve the number of global malaria deaths in the last two decades.

But more than 400,000 people still die of the illness every year.

Tedros said this vaccine is a gift to the world, but added "its value will be felt most in Africa, because that's where the burden of malaria is greatest."

More than 90% of malaria cases occur in Africa, according to the WHO.

Malaria killed 409,000 people in 2019 - the latest year with available data - and nearly all of them lived in sub-Saharan Africa. About 67% of those deaths, or more than a quarter-million fatalities, were children under age 5.