 Everyone involved in malaria control has a fervent wish a malaria vaccine is found.
There is promising news about one potential malaria vaccine, called PfSPZ, at an early stage of trials.
" A malaria vaccine has become the first to provide 100% protection against the disease, confounding critics and far surpassing any other experimental malaria vaccine tested. It will now be tested further in clinical trials in Africa. The results are important because they demonstrate for the first time the concept that a malaria vaccine can provide a high level of protection, says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, adding that the findings are cause for 'cautious optimism'" says an article in Nature.
There are significant further trials required - and other vaccines that have shown early promise have proved not viable - as well as there being potential delivery (i.e. pill, standard injection or intravenous injection) and logistics (i.e. does the vaccine need to be kept cold?) hurdles to overcome.
A good summary seems the following from an article on discovermagazine.com: " Researchers aren't sure if this particular vaccine will prevent all strains of the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, and having to take five intravenous vaccines is not practical for large-scale use at this point. Still, the effective protection demonstrated in this study is a promising first step toward developing a more realistic anti-malarial vaccine that doesn't require hundreds of mosquito bites."
The BBC reports " There are currently about 20 malaria vaccine candidates in clinical trials."
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