The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended a second malaria vaccine for children.
The health body says the R21/Matrix-M vaccine developed by Britain's Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, has already been approved for use in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria.
Malaria kills more than 600,000 people each year globally, most of them children in Africa.
"As a malaria researcher, I used to dream of the day we would have a safe and effective vaccine against malaria. Now we have two," the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a briefing in Geneva on Monday.
Need for second vaccine
The RTS,S vaccine, produced by British pharmaceutical giant GSK, became the first to be recommended by the WHO in 2021 to prevent malaria in children in areas with moderate to high malaria transmission.
"GSK has always recognised the need for a second malaria vaccine, but it is increasingly evident that RTS,S, the first ever malaria vaccine and the first ever vaccine against a human parasite, set a strong benchmark," GSK said in a statement.
The company added that more than1.7 million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi had received at least one dose of the shot, and it would be rolled out in another nine malaria-endemic countries from early next year.
The WHO said both vaccines had shown similar efficacy in separate trials, but without a head-to-head trial there was no evidence showing whether one performed better.
Countries to decide
The agency has left it to countries to decide which product to use based on various factors, including the affordability and supply.
The WHO regional director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, said the new vaccine held great potential for the continent by helping to close the huge demand-and-supply gap.
"Delivered to scale and rolled out widely, the two vaccines can help bolster malaria prevention and control efforts and save hundreds of thousands of young lives in Africa from this deadly disease," she said.
