Spanish doctor finds vaccine against malaria

[Ferran]

Spanish doctor finds vaccine against malaria

16 November 2005

MADRID — A Spanish doctor is behind a vaccine which has been shown to partially protect children from malaria for at least 18 months.

The British medical magazine The Lancet reported Pedro Alonso and his team had carried out clinical trials on more than 2,000 children in Mozambique aged between one and four.

The results proved the vaccine, known as RTS,S/ASOZA, reduced the risk of clinical malaria, delayed the time before a new infection and reduced episodes of severe malaria over six months in African children.

A follow-up of those children now shows that the vaccine prevented 49 percent of severe malaria cases during the 18 months following itsadministration.

This fact "confirms the potential malaria vaccines to become credible control tools for public health use", the report says.

Alonso, who works at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona, lead the trials in Mozambique with support from the Spanish International Cooperation Agency and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated USD 50 million for the trials to get underway.

The Gates Foundation has also said it will give another USD 107m.

GlaxoSmithKline, which is developing the vaccine, has said it may be ready for the market by 2011.

[Copyright EFE with Expatica]


Source:
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_...gainst+malaria

[Menydh]

The first breakthrough in a vaccine against the malaria was developed by Colombian Dr. Manuel Patarroyo in the mid-eighties. I believe that the malaria transmitted by mosquitos in America is different to that in Africa or Asia, the former being less grave. In any case, his vaccine wasn't finally all what was expected but served for further research.

Dr. Patarroyo, a proud Hispanist himself, who obtained funds from Spain to help him with his research, made a strong critique against the Anglo-Saxon fashion of making these discoveries serve to obtain financial profits, and said that his intention was to donate the vaccine to the U.N. so that it could be made available cheap for poor countries which is where malaria is suffered, which he did.