NAIROBI: Kenya yesterday added the world’s first malaria vaccine to the routine immunization schedule for children under two, becoming the third country in Africa to roll out the vaccine for the disease that kills one child globally every two minutes.
Malaria is a top killer of children under five in the East African nation, and the vaccine is critically important to its efforts to combat the disease because other measures such as mosquito nets have not proven adequate, the director general of Kenya’s health ministry, Wekesa Masasabi, told Reuters.
“We still have an incidence of 27 percent (malaria infection) for children under five,” Masasabi said before yesterday’s launch of the vaccine in the western county of Homa Bay.
The Homa Bay programme was the government’s first step toward creating awareness of the new vaccine, he said. African nations Ghana and Malawi launched their pilot programmes of the vaccine earlier this year. Kenya plans to roll out the vaccine to eight of its 47 counties over the next two years, Masasabi said. – Reuters
