Date: 11/10/2008
By DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) _ Researchers trying to create the world’s first malaria vaccine are launching a large medical trial as early as next month involving 16,000 children that could be the largest such trial ever conducted on children in Africa.
British-drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC is teaming with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is an anti-malaria charity funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and clinics and research centers in Africa to develop a malaria vaccine.
“This is probably going to be one of the largest studies in infants and in children in Africa,” said Joe Cohen, a top vaccine researcher for GlaxoSmithKline.
Malaria, caused by parasites and spread by mosquitoes, kills nearly 1 million people every year, most of them children in Africa. The trial may start as early as next month, and should be well under way by January, said Cohen.
The massive vaccine trials will be conducted in Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Dr. Christian Loucq, director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, said the project has been working over the past year to upgrade laboratory, computer and other equipment in those countries, train technicians, and even help develop local equivalents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure the trials are properly monitored.
The Malaria Vaccine Initiative has so far spent $107 million on the project and has not yet calculated how much more is coming. GlaxoSmithKline has spent $300 million so far, and estimates there will be $100 million more.
Researchers working on the trial said in an interview in Johannesburg that much of the groundwork already has been laid in preliminary trials involving 4,000 children conducted since 2003.
They said that even if their vaccine does not succeed, the widespread investment needed to conduct the trials means that Africa will be left with better communications, research and other infrastructure that could be used in the search for vaccines against other diseases such as AIDS.
While the researchers were optimistic, it will be several years before they know whether their vaccine candidate is safe and effective enough for wide use.
The preliminary trials showed the vaccine was likely to be at least 30 percent effective against mild malaria cases and about 50 percent effective against severe malaria. That may sound low compared to, for example, the injectable polio vaccine that is at least 90 percent effective. But researchers have found it difficult to pin down a vaccine for parasites, and further tests may show the GlaxoSmithKline candidate is more effective, Cohen said.
Dr. Michel Van Herp, an epidemiologist with the aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, said a vaccine might have to be more effective than the GlaxoSmithKline candidate has been shown to be so far to be worth the effort of putting it in use. But he acknowledged that matching the effectiveness of the polio vaccine has proven difficult, and said a partially effective vaccine “at least will reduce the workload on the health sector.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, is not involved in vaccine research, but is at the forefront of treating malaria among the poor in Africa and elsewhere.
The vaccine would have to be used along with preventive measures like mosquito nets and insecticides to save lives.
Dr. Eusebio Macete, who is director of the Manhica Research Centre in Mozambique and was involved in some of the early field trials, said stopping any percentage of the disease would be welcomed in areas “where people are dying every day of malaria.”
“It’s a huge, huge burden, this disease,” Macete said. “Whatever percentage we can get will be useful in reducing the impact of the disease.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Group calls for free malaria treatment in Africa
NOTE: Malaria not only kills 1 million people each year, survivors may suffer brain damage. Children are the most vulnerable to this disease.
Date: 9/30/2008 9:22 AM
By DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press Writer
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) _ Making tests and treatment for malaria free dramatically increases the number of people who seek treatment for the disease that kills 1 million people a year, an international medical aid group said Tuesday.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, acknowledged that that has sobering implications for the cost of wiping out malaria, but insisted it is necessary.
The group released a report with recommendations for combatting malaria based on its experience with hundreds of thousands of patients in Chad, Sierra Leone and Mali. It said free treatment, expanding the use of a quick test and training villagers to identify and treat simple cases themselves are key.
Christine Jamet, head of MSF’s operations in Chad, told reporters at a news conference in Johannesburg that the number of patients treated in one region of that central African country after free tests and drugs were introduced increased in one year from 10,000 to 100,000.
Some 90 percent of the villagers in the region subsisted on less than a dollar a day, she said. If people living in those circumstances are asked to pay for treatment, Jamet said, “they will have to decide: ‘Do I choose to pay, or do I choose to buy food? It’s as basic as that.”
Seco P. Gerard, a Belgian-based MSF policy adviser, said existing clinics and medical staff could absorb some of the increase, but not all.
“Health has a cost, that’s for sure,” Gerard said. “It costs what it costs. It needs to be done.”
The U.N. has launched an initiative to dramatically step up the fight against malaria with the ultimate aim of eliminating the disease, which is spread by mosquitoes and can be easily prevented or treated when resources are available. The head of the U.N. project said MSF’s recommendations made sense.
Expanding testing will “ensure that we are treating malaria and not other diseases,” said Awa Marie Coll-Seck, executive director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, a joint project of the World Bank and the U.N. health, children’s and development agencies. That would safe lives now lost because of improper treatment, as well as help experts refine their estimates of the toll malaria is taking.
In launching its malaria campaign on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, Roll Back Malaria estimated it would cost $5.3 billion in 2009, $6.2 billion in 2010 and $5.1 billion annually from 2011 to 2020. Coll-Seck in an interview with The Associated Press said some of that spending would be for providing free tests and treatment.
Roll Back Malaria was not involved in compiling the report MSF released Tuesday, but works with MSF on malaria projects. The U.N. group estimates 3.3 billion people — more than half the world’s population — live in areas where they risk contracting malaria, and the disease kills nearly 1 million people every year, most of them children in Africa. Survivors may suffer brain damage.
“Those figures are even more revolting when you know we have the medical tools … to diagnose the disease and treat it,” Gerard said. “But the fact is that very few patients have access.”
MSF treated 1.3 million malaria patients around the world last year. Pilot MSF projects in Chad, Sierre Leone and Mali focused on what the group saw as the two main barriers for many poor people: the costs of tests and of treatment with the state-of-the-art cocktail of drugs known as ACT, and the difficulties of reaching health centers.
“I fully agree with the strategy of using village health workers to provide health care for malaria,” said Helen Counihan, an expert with the London-based Malaria Consortium. But she said more research was needed on village health workers’ use of the rapid diagnostic tests MSF is recommending be more widely used.
The consortium, which is not connected to MSF or Tuesday’s report, hoped to have results next year from a study it is conducting in Zambia evaluating whether community health workers continue to use the tests accurately over time with just routine supervision after initial training.
Sunil Mehra, executive director of the Malaria Consortium, applauded MSF’s recommendations, but said the next steps would be finding funding, and political support at country level for change.
“We need to have some consistency amongst the donors,” Mehra added.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Date: 9/30/2008 9:22 AM
By DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press Writer
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) _ Making tests and treatment for malaria free dramatically increases the number of people who seek treatment for the disease that kills 1 million people a year, an international medical aid group said Tuesday.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, acknowledged that that has sobering implications for the cost of wiping out malaria, but insisted it is necessary.
The group released a report with recommendations for combatting malaria based on its experience with hundreds of thousands of patients in Chad, Sierra Leone and Mali. It said free treatment, expanding the use of a quick test and training villagers to identify and treat simple cases themselves are key.
Christine Jamet, head of MSF’s operations in Chad, told reporters at a news conference in Johannesburg that the number of patients treated in one region of that central African country after free tests and drugs were introduced increased in one year from 10,000 to 100,000.
Some 90 percent of the villagers in the region subsisted on less than a dollar a day, she said. If people living in those circumstances are asked to pay for treatment, Jamet said, “they will have to decide: ‘Do I choose to pay, or do I choose to buy food? It’s as basic as that.”
Seco P. Gerard, a Belgian-based MSF policy adviser, said existing clinics and medical staff could absorb some of the increase, but not all.
“Health has a cost, that’s for sure,” Gerard said. “It costs what it costs. It needs to be done.”
The U.N. has launched an initiative to dramatically step up the fight against malaria with the ultimate aim of eliminating the disease, which is spread by mosquitoes and can be easily prevented or treated when resources are available. The head of the U.N. project said MSF’s recommendations made sense.
Expanding testing will “ensure that we are treating malaria and not other diseases,” said Awa Marie Coll-Seck, executive director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, a joint project of the World Bank and the U.N. health, children’s and development agencies. That would safe lives now lost because of improper treatment, as well as help experts refine their estimates of the toll malaria is taking.
In launching its malaria campaign on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, Roll Back Malaria estimated it would cost $5.3 billion in 2009, $6.2 billion in 2010 and $5.1 billion annually from 2011 to 2020. Coll-Seck in an interview with The Associated Press said some of that spending would be for providing free tests and treatment.
Roll Back Malaria was not involved in compiling the report MSF released Tuesday, but works with MSF on malaria projects. The U.N. group estimates 3.3 billion people — more than half the world’s population — live in areas where they risk contracting malaria, and the disease kills nearly 1 million people every year, most of them children in Africa. Survivors may suffer brain damage.
“Those figures are even more revolting when you know we have the medical tools … to diagnose the disease and treat it,” Gerard said. “But the fact is that very few patients have access.”
MSF treated 1.3 million malaria patients around the world last year. Pilot MSF projects in Chad, Sierre Leone and Mali focused on what the group saw as the two main barriers for many poor people: the costs of tests and of treatment with the state-of-the-art cocktail of drugs known as ACT, and the difficulties of reaching health centers.
“I fully agree with the strategy of using village health workers to provide health care for malaria,” said Helen Counihan, an expert with the London-based Malaria Consortium. But she said more research was needed on village health workers’ use of the rapid diagnostic tests MSF is recommending be more widely used.
The consortium, which is not connected to MSF or Tuesday’s report, hoped to have results next year from a study it is conducting in Zambia evaluating whether community health workers continue to use the tests accurately over time with just routine supervision after initial training.
Sunil Mehra, executive director of the Malaria Consortium, applauded MSF’s recommendations, but said the next steps would be finding funding, and political support at country level for change.
“We need to have some consistency amongst the donors,” Mehra added.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
