Fever, headache and muscle pain: Sander de Kramer suddenly became very ill seven weeks ago, during a flight from Sierra Leone to the Netherlands. “It was very intense,” he tells Editie NL. “It felt like a nutcracker had been put on my head.”
‘A ditch of pills’
He recognized the symptoms quickly. “I’ve read a lot about malaria and luckily I was quick to catch up.” In the hospital it turned out that he indeed had the infectious disease.
De Kramer, in his own words, was prescribed ‘a ditch of pills’. “I was treated well. Yet for weeks I was very tired, weak and irritable.”
There are more like De Kramer: malaria affects 150 to 300 Dutch people every year. Worldwide, the infectious disease kills 450,000 annually. This is apparent from figures from the RIVM and ‘Drive against Malaria’.
Vaccine
But those numbers are expected to decline in the future, as the University of Oxford vaccine is proving highly effective. “Previously, the short-term effect of the vaccine had already been published, but now the long-term effects are also known,” explains malaria researcher Matthew McCall of Radboudumc. “This vaccine is loosely based on Mosquirix, the first and only malaria vaccine currently being administered.”
Research results
Last year, the World Health Organization gave the green light to the first malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, which is 30 percent effective. The first research results of the malaria vaccine from Oxford are very promising: they show that the new vaccine offers up to 80 percent protection.
While significant strides have been made – a few years ago we didn’t have any vaccine against malaria – there is still work to be done, McCall says. “We are definitely not there yet. The new vaccine alone will not solve the problem. There will be a significant reduction in the number of cases, but infections will still occur.”
Different types of malaria
This has to do with the different types of malaria parasites. “You can compare it with the coronavirus. The vaccine is less effective against some of those variants. It is extremely difficult to develop one unique vaccine against all those forms of malaria. We are struggling with that.”
“Nevertheless, it is certainly good news,” he continues. “It can definitely make a difference.”