Breakthrough as highly effective malaria vaccine raises hopes of controlling disease

The vaccine, developed by Oxford and known as R21, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months, the university said in a statement. It said the shot was the first to meet the World Health Organization's Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap goal of a malaria vaccine with at least 75% efficacy. "These are very exciting results showing unprecedented efficacy levels from a vaccine that has been well tolerated in our trial programme," Halidou Tinto, the trial's principal investigator, said in a statement. "We look forward to the upcoming Phase III trial to demonstrate large-scale safety and efficacy data for a vaccine that is greatly needed in this region."... Malaria is a parasitic disease transmitted through the bite of female Anopheles mosquitoes. It is both preventable and treatable, yet an estimated 435,000 people die of it each year, with the majority being children younger than five.