Nigeria has some of the highest number of deaths from malaria worldwide. Usually, peak malaria season takes place during the rainy season from August to mid-October, when mosquitoes breed, after which patient numbers begin to decrease. This year, however, medical teams from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) working in northeast Nigeria’s Borno state have witnessed a […]
Tag: Malaria
·As WHO certifies Cabo Verde 3rd malaria-free African country In 1973, when the World Health Organisation, WHO, certified Mauritius as the first African country to eliminate malaria, Nigeria was not in contention for certification. That year, the first single comprehensive blueprint for global malaria control and elimination, the Global Malaria Eradication Programme, GMEP, was already […]
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Uganda to Get First-Ever Malaria Vaccine
Kampala — In response to high demand for the first-ever malaria vaccine, Uganda has been listed among 12 countries in Africa that will be allocated a total of 18 million doses of RTS,S/AS01 for the 2023-2025 period. The first doses of the vaccine are expected to arrive in countries during the last quarter of 2023, […]
Each year antimicrobial resistance – the ability of microbes to survive agents designed to kill them – claims more lives than malaria and HIV/Aids combined. Africa bears the brunt of this development, which thrives on inequality and poverty. Nadine Dreyer asked Tom Nyirenda, a research scientist with over 27 years’ experience in infectious diseases, what […]
“More than ever, we must collaborate to ensure that no child or person dies of malaria…,” he said. Global partnerships and investments in the fight against malaria have yielded positive results by preventing some two billion malaria cases, saving 11.7 million lives and putting eradication within reach. The President of Dangote Group and United Nations […]
The 194 Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) are currently negotiating the first pandemic accord. Acknowledging that the world learned many hard lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic, governments have agreed that effective mechanisms must be put in place to prevent, prepare, and better respond to the next global health threat. The African region […]
The approval of two malaria vaccines – the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine in 2021 and the R21/Matrix-MTM vaccine in 2023 – will help control, and eventually help eradicate, a disease that causes more than 600,000 deaths annually. Nearly 2 million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi have been vaccinated with the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine. It will be rolled […]
Cameroon has begun a large-scale malaria vaccination campaign that’s supposed to see 250,000 children immunized this year and next. Experts say it will save lives, even though the vaccine isn’t perfect. On Monday, health authorities in Cameroon kicked off a vaccination campaign against malaria, a parasitic disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people every […]
The Minister for Health, Dr. Ruth Aceng has announced that Malaria cases at the outpatient Department (OPD) in epidemic districts have dropped from 109,938 in March 2023 to the current 58,822 a drop of 46%. She also says that there has been a reduction in admissions from 6,216 to 3,772 which is a drop of […]
More than 330 000 doses of WHO-recommended RTS,S malaria vaccine arrived last night in Cameroon – a historic step towards broader vaccination against one of the deadliest diseases for African children Malaria burden is the highest on the African continent, which accounted for approximately 95% of global malaria cases and 96% of related deaths in […]
Bulawayo — In March 2023, more than 600 people died in Malawi after Tropical Cyclone Freddy dumped heavy rain, flooding the southern part of the country, displacing over half a million people, and damaging property and livelihoods. The Malawi calamity is a stark example of “loss and damage” – the negative impacts of human-caused climate […]
The world is facing significant demographic changes. In addition, we are more at risk for new infectious outbreaks than ever before. Climate change threatens to make all these challenges even worse. While they may seem intractable, experience has shown that global cooperation provides a proven path to progress. Two decades of investment has halved child […]
Halfway to the target date for the realisation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the promise of health for all hangs in the balance, making it more important than ever that we make up for the ground lost during the Covid-19 pandemic, writes Dr Susan Nakhumicha Wafula in a guest column for AllAfrica. Dr […]
Cape Verde has been certified malaria-free by the World Health Organization. The archipelago to the west of Senegal consists of 10 islands, and has a population of over 500,000 people. It is the third country in Africa to be declared malaria-free, after Mauritius (in 1973) and Algeria (in 2019). This brings the total of malaria-free […]
Kampala — Ghana on April 13 became the first country to approve public usage of a new experimental vaccine for children to protect them from malaria. The R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine is a low-dose vaccine that can be manufactured at mass scale and modest cost, enabling as many as hundreds of millions of doses to be […]
It is an oft-repeated fact that the deadliest creature on earth is the mosquito, a terrifying transmitter of the malaria parasite. According to the most recent World Malaria Report 2022, there were 619 000 deaths in 2021, with 90% of these occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. Those most likely to die are children under five years […]
Nairobi — Kenya’s Ministry of Health announced that, starting on March 7, 2023, more children in the country will benefit from the added protection of the world’s first malaria vaccine, RTS,S/AS01 (or RTS,S). The malaria vaccine expansion follows the Kenya National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (KENITAG) recommendation for expansion within Kenya’s lake-endemic region and the […]
The Kenya Medical Research Institute recently detected an invasive mosquito species in Laisamis and Saku subcounties of Marsabit county in Kenya’s northern region. This mosquito, Anopheles stephensi, is native to South Asia and the Middle East. It transmits the two malaria parasites that pose the greatest risk of severe illness and death: Plasmodium falciparum and […]