Malaria: Combining vaccine with prophylaxis cuts child deaths by 73%, study finds

Hundreds of thousands of children’s lives could be saved each year in Africa by combining the world’s first effective malaria vaccine with the current recommended approach of giving children prophylactic antimalarials for four months each year, a large study has found.

A study conducted in in Mali and Burkina Faso set out to test whether seasonal use of the vaccine alone, known as RTS,S or Mosquirix, could match the protection offered by seasonal malaria chemoprevention. But although the vaccine and chemoprevention arms of the trial saw roughly equal protective effects, the surprise result came from a third group who received both interventions, a combination that proved greater than the sum of its parts. The findings were published in the New …