What is the importance of continuing public health ventures along with research to help control malaria?
There’s a lot of effort going on in malaria vaccine development and drug development, but children are dying every minute, and so it’s imperative that public health measures are maintained and increased to help the children of today to make it to the age of 10 when they’ve developed naturally acquired immunity. A vaccine is not around the corner. Even if we had an effective vaccine today, it’s still years before that vaccine would be able to complete the necessary clinical trials in support of licensure, and we don’t have a vaccine in hand right now that we believe is optimal and that is going to give us the kind of protection that we’re going to need, so we are years away. Certainly, once we have substantial protection, and the kind of vaccine that is likely to make it all the way through the development process, then I think there’s hope out there, and then it’s just a matter of making sure that the vaccine continues to be safe in larger and larger numbers of people, and then its eff
