Combine an anti-malarial drug with the Mosquirix vaccine to reduce malaria incidence and mortality in young African children by almost 75%. This is the surprising conclusion of a study published in the English scientific journal The New England Journal of Medicine, published after an experiment that took place over three years.
This experiment was performed in different regions of Mali and Burkina Faso on 6,000 children over a year and a half. The idea was not to test a new treatment but a new combination. To know, a classic preventive treatment with malarial drugs such as amodiaquin and an injection of Mosquirix preventive vaccine from the Gsk laboratory, which has been tested for several years. The combination was administered just before the worst season of malaria, the rainy season.
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The results impressed the researchers: if we compare the children who only received the preventive treatment with those who were treated with this combination, they are two and a half times less likely to get malaria, three times less likely to develop a severe form and therefore to go to the hospital. . Finally, mortality has dropped by almost 75%.
These results were welcomed by the WHO and by Malian researchers who participated in the study and who are now waiting for concrete decisions on the implementation of this treatment for young children.
Most of the 400,000 people who die of malaria each year are children under the age of five.
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