African vaccine could help end malaria

Dividing her days between treating malaria in Kenya’s coastal regions and administering the latest malaria vaccine prototype, Dr. Patricia Njuguna has high hopes for preventing a disease that annually claims more lives than cancer. The vaccine which Njuguna is testing, known as RTS,S, has been heralded as one of the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2011 by Time and Science magazines, Doctors Without Borders and The Lancet. It has been developed over the last 25 years as a joint public-private collaboration by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) World Malaria Report 2011 released in December, 650,000 malaria deaths occurred in 2010, almost all in children under age five, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa. Until recently, efforts to control malaria have been aimed largely at preventing mosquito bites and treating clinical disease. The word eradication...