Nigeria is set to become the second African country to approve a vaccine to curtail the prevalence of malaria which afflicts and kills thousands of people yearly in the West African country.
The announcement was made Monday by the country’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (Nafdac) Director-General Mojisola Adeyeye.
The malaria vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, which has been developed by United Kingdom’s Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, was first approved in Africa by Ghana.
Adeyeye said the vaccine would prevent malaria in children aged 5 to 36 months.
“Nigeria expects to get at least 100,000 doses of the vaccine in donations soon before the market authorisation,” Adeyeye said.
“The R21/Matrix-M vaccine is the second ever to be approved by the WHO and showed a 77 percent protection efficacy over 12 months in a phase 2b trial involving young West African children,” she explained.
The first-ever malaria vaccine from British drug maker GSK, mosquirix or RTS was approved by the WHO in 2021 after decades of work, but a lack of funding and commercial potential thwarted the company’s capacity to produce the needed doses.
Various researches also showed that the effectiveness of GSK’s vaccine was approximately 60 percent and significantly waned over time, even with a booster dose.
When the mosquirix vaccine was approved, the WHO said it was based on results from an ongoing pilot programme in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019.
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According to Adeyeye, the R21 malaria vaccine dossier complied substantially with the best international standards with which the dossier was bench-marked.
She said the dossier was subjected to independent reviews by Nafdac’s vaccine advisory committee according to WHO standards and other guidelines.
Repellent fabric developed
The search for malaria cure has continued in Nigeria with the latest breakthrough announced by the country’s Kaduna State University on a developed mosquito repellent fabric.
The university’s Prof Zakari Ladan said that the institution was in a path to end the malaria scourge.
He added that the nightgowns were produced from the fabric, rather than the continuous use of chemical insecticides or mosquito-treated nets with synthetic chemicals.
“The type of mosquito-repellent fabrics developed from this research is in the form of sleeping nightgowns with other bio-products which include bio-insecticide sprays and repellent creams formulated with the plant’s bioactive constituent for the control of mosquito bites,” he said.
Read: Rwanda gets vaccine production equipment
Decrease in malaria prevalence
According to Nigeria’s Health Minister Osagie Ehanire, the country recorded a slight decrease in malaria prevalence from 23 percent in 2018 to 22 per cent in 2021.
Ehanire said that while this may not appear significant at the national level, substantial gains have been observed in several Nigerian states and lamented that malaria is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the nation, with young children and pregnant women extremely affected.
Global malaria burden
He said the disease accounts for Nigeria’s 60 percent of outpatient visits to health facilities, 30 percent of childhood deaths, 11 percent of maternal death (4,500 die yearly), and 25 percent of deaths in infants (children aged 1 year).
He further said the 2021 World Malaria Report from the WHO showed that nine to 10 persons die every hour due to malaria or malaria-related issues in Nigeria and that the country contributes 27 percent to the global malaria burden and 32 percent to malaria deaths globally.
He announced that children under five years of age remained the most vulnerable group, accounting for 67 percent of all malaria deaths.
