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The World Health Organization recommended the second malaria vaccine, two years after the first received this international recognition. Additionally, it issued its first recommendation for a dengue vaccine in history, a drug that may be promising in Latin America.
Almost exactly two years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) gave unprecedented news: it recommended the first vaccine against malaria, a disease for which it was believed there was no cure. Now, on October 2, it became clear that there is not one remedy but two, when the entity’s general director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that they recommended a second vaccine.
“As a malaria researcher, I used to dream of the day we would have a safe and effective vaccine against malaria. Today we have two,” Ghebreyesus remembered.
This is the drug R21/Matrix M, developed by the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India. The medicine shows an effectiveness of 75% when it is inoculated just before the start of the season where malaria infections increase in countries where the disease is seasonal and 66% when it is administered according to the age of the children without taking into account seasons.
On the other hand, the WHO also recommended the first dengue vaccine to make it onto this list, the drug Qdenga from the Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda. For now, the vaccine will be intended for children and adolescents between 6 and 12 years old.
However, it is not the first vaccine that exists against dengue: the drug developed by Sanofi called Dengvaxia has been in circulation for years, but it is believed that Qdenga could present some essential advantages. A setback with Dengvaxia is that it needs to be injected into people who have already been infected with dengue once, something logistically complex and that kept a large part of the child population, who had not yet been exposed to the disease, out of the vaccination campaigns. .
Qdenga, which is already approved in Argentina and Brazil, could fill that void.
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