By Doreen Ampofo
Ghana will soon roll out malaria vaccine across the country. Already, the WHO has approved five-million-dollar funding for a scale-up in districts in the six regions which were not part of the pilot implementation.
This will be done by the end of this year by the Expanded Programme on Immunization under the Ghana Health Service. This came up during an interview with the project Manager Malaria Vaccine Pilot Evaluation in Ghana, who is also a research fellow at the Kintampo Health Research Centre Dr. Thomas Gyan during a field trip by journalists with the African Media Malaria Research Network. Dr. Gyan says initial findings are showing a 9% reduction of malaria mortality in children.
“Now I know the attention is just to give it to the other distributing or giving the vaccine. If you are able to roll out to those districts, it will be easier to not scale up to rest of the country”, he said.
In Ghana, the Malaria vaccine is being implemented in selected districts in Central, Volta, Bono East, Bono, Ahafo and Oti regions. More than one million RTSS malaria vaccines have been administered to babies below 2 years since implementation began in 2019.
RTSS is the first Malaria Vaccine recommended for broad use by WHO. According to Dr Thomas Gyan research has shown that severe malaria cases in children have reduced drastically.
“We are hoping that by early next year, we will finish the data collection for the mortality outcome where we will be able to determine the actual impact of the vaccine of the authority.”
He added that districts in the six regions which did not benefit from the vaccine will have them by close of year.
“For the RTSS Malaria Vaccine, that is the first Malaria Vaccine. So, after the WHO recommendation has finally been secured to first rule out to the district that are not implementing the vaccine in the 6 regions and then following that the plans will be put in place to rule out in the rest of the country. It’s not very well and the acceptance rate is very high which is very good”.
He noted that ” we need to look at the vaccination coverages. It’s very high. Initially people had difficulty in the vaccine but things are doing well. First, we rule out starting from the Regional then Districts that are not given the vaccine first. They deserve to receive then after that the national rollout.”
The vaccine is also being implemented in Malawi and Kenya. These two countries will also benefit from the scale-up.
