Hopes for new malaria vaccine

[dipsydoodle]

Source: Sky News 5:56pm UK, Tuesday October 18, 2011

A new malaria vaccine could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, new research suggests.

The vaccine, developed with the help of British scientists, halves the rate of severe malaria in babies and young children.

Malaria kills around 800,000 people a year. Most are children under five years old.

Colin Sutherland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said the results were "very exciting".

Read more: http://news.sky.com/home/article/16091665

[cleanhippie]

1. But I thought vaccines caused autism. Aren't vaccines bad and just a BIG PHARMA scam?

At least that's what some here tell me.

:shrug:

[dtexdem]

5. The bugnutty anti-vaccine crowd aside, the real big pharma scam is ...

what GSK is apparently not doing with this one: charging outrageous prices, especially in the third world.

[MineralMan]

2. I hope this vaccine works out. With global temperatures rising,

malaria could establish itself here in the USA. If that happens, people will be demanding a vaccine. As long as it stays elsewhere, nobody seems to care much, it seems. I hope the efforts to find an effective prevention method for malaria end up with an effective solution. Malaria is a horrible disease that affects huge numbers of people.

[dipsydoodle]

4. This is a different type of vaccine - apparently

It acts to block the cause of the infection rather than control it. Just been discussed on BBC News here too so might show up over your side on BBC World.

[pinto]

3. Abstract - Methods, Results, Conclusions from New Eng Jour Med :

Background
An ongoing phase 3 study of the efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity of candidate malaria vaccine RTS,S/AS01 is being conducted in seven African countries.

Full Text of Background...

Methods
From March 2009 through January 2011, we enrolled 15,460 children in two age categories — 6 to 12 weeks of age and 5 to 17 months of age — for vaccination with either RTS,S/AS01 or a non-malaria comparator vaccine. The primary end point of the analysis was vaccine efficacy against clinical malaria during the 12 months after vaccination in the first 6000 children 5 to 17 months of age at enrollment who received all three doses of vaccine according to protocol. After 250 children had an episode of severe malaria, we evaluated vaccine efficacy against severe malaria in both age categories.

Full Text of Methods...

Results
In the 14 months after the first dose of vaccine, the incidence of first episodes of clinical malaria in the first 6000 children in the older age category was 0.32 episodes per person-year in the RTS,S/AS01 group and 0.55 episodes per person-year in the control group, for an efficacy of 50.4% (95% confidence interval , 45.8 to 54.6) in the intention-to-treat population and 55.8% (97.5% CI, 50.6 to 60.4) in the per-protocol population. Vaccine efficacy against severe malaria was 45.1% (95% CI, 23.8 to 60.5) in the intention-to-treat population and 47.3% (95% CI, 22.4 to 64.2) in the per-protocol population. Vaccine efficacy against severe malaria in the combined age categories was 34.8% (95% CI, 16.2 to 49.2) in the per-protocol population during an average follow-up of 11 months. Serious adverse events occurred with a similar frequency in the two study groups. Among children in the older age category, the rate of generalized convulsive seizures after RTS,S/AS01 vaccination was 1.04 per 1000 doses (95% CI, 0.62 to 1.64).

Full Text of Results...

Conclusions
The RTS,S/AS01 vaccine provided protection against both clinical and severe malaria in African children. (Funded by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative; RTS,S ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00866619.)

NEJM.org Copyright © 2011 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1102287?query=OF