"Today is Africa Malaria Day, and, like every other day, three children will die from malaria every minute. Most of these will be African children, and most will be under the age of five.
Africa Malaria Day is an opportunity to focus on changing this bleak reality by mobilizing people and organizations around the world toward the pursuit of a malaria vaccine. Vaccines against infectious diseases are unmatched in their ability to deliver dramatic improvements in public health. Vaccines reduce the drain on productivity caused by frequent sickness and premature death and also reduce the need for drugs that are often not accessible to those who need them most.
Recently, scientists have made important headway in understanding the make-up of the malaria parasite and learning where it is most vulnerable. With these and other advances in science and biotechnology, there is great promise for making a vaccine to prevent this devastating disease. But translating knowledge into an effective vaccine means we need to invest in the future—both in vaccine development and in improving immunization systems to ensure that an effective malaria vaccine, once licensed, can be effectively delivered.
In 1999, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding to establish the Malaria Vaccine Initiative at Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). We hope people in Africa and other malaria-endemic areas can benefit from the incredible advances in biomedical research that are improving health in the industrialized world. The Malaria Vaccine Initiative is a model for collaboration between the public and private sectors in accelerating vaccine development—working to make sure that those most capable of creating effective vaccines do so, and that those most in need have access to vaccines once they’re developed.
Through the malaria vaccine trials that are now ongoing—many of which are in Africa—we are working toward the day when children in the African countryside are immunized against malaria much in the way they are against other common childhood diseases. I hope that in the not too distant future we will observe Africa Malaria Day not to remind us of the challenges that lie ahead but to celebrate a time when the bite of a mosquito for an African child means what it does to an American child: an itch, but not sickness or death."
For more information on MVI's most recent malaria vaccine trials in Africa, please visit: http://www.malariavaccine.org/files/20020425-USArmy.htm.
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