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 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% (malaria infection) for children
under five," Masasabi said before Friday's launch of the vaccine in
the western county of Homa Bay.
The Homa Bay program was the government's first step toward creating
awareness of the new vaccine, he said.
African nations Ghana and Malawi launched their pilot programs 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.
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Malaria can be eradicated within a generation, global health experts
said in a major report last weekend that was commissioned by The
Lancet medical journal. The Lancet report contradicted the
conclusions last month of a malaria review by the World Health
Organization, and its experts urged the WHO not to shy away from
this "goal of epic proportions".
Malaria infected about 219 million people in 2017, killing around
435,000 of them, the vast majority babies and children in the
poorest parts of Africa.
Due to ongoing transmission, half the world's population is still at
risk of contracting malaria.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick; Editing by Tom Hogue)
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