BBC World features the race to find malaria vaccines for Africa
BBC World and Rockhopper TV invite you to watch the race toward one of the most urgently needed immunizations of our time: a vaccine to protect young African children against the deadly malaria parasite.
Driven to conquer a disease that each year kills more than a million people and sickens countless others—in Africa a child dies every 30 seconds from malaria—scientists have reached for every modern tool available to wage war on a parasite so old and resilient its DNA has been found in ancient Egyptian mummies.
Kill or Cure? The Malaria Vaccine takes viewers into the starkly different worlds of these cutting edge investigators who may be moving us tantalizingly close to an achievement unheard of in the history of immunizations—an effective vaccine against a parasitic disease.
One of these scientists, Dr. Stephen Hoffman, works in the labs of Sanaria, Inc., just outside the US capital, guiding a team that harvests millions of malaria parasites by hand from the salivary glands of infected mosquitoes and irradiating them to help create a “whole-parasite” vaccine.
Meanwhile, Dr. Salim Abdulla works out of a field hospital in rural Tanzania, testing a vaccine candidate in an environment where the suffering of malaria can be seen everywhere—in children, their mothers, in entire communities. His clinical trial is focused on GlaxoSmithKline Biological’s RTS,S vaccine, which uses a component of the surface of the parasite to induce human immunity.
Uniting these vaccine development efforts is the fact that both approaches have received the backing of MVI, a global program whose many partnerships are bringing the world closer than ever to the elusive yet critically important malaria vaccine.
MVI’s support for the production of Kill or Cure? The Malaria Vaccine was made possible by a grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation through its Africa Health Initiative.
Please email mvi_info@path.org to request your complimentary DVD copy of Kill or Cure? The Malaria Vaccine.
