EXTREME WEATHER conditions have led to a significant surge in malaria infections and fatalities raising concerns about the welfare of children afflicted by the disease, a global health leader has revealed.

In March Cyclone Freddy triggered six months’ worth of rainfall in six days in Malawi, causing malaria cases there to spike Peter Sands, head of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told AFP in an interview.

Cases of malaria in Pakistan have also risen after devastating floods last year left a third of the country under water, according to the World Health  Organization (WHO).

Evidence

Sands said that these cases provide clear evidence of the detrimental influence of climate change on malaria. Extreme weather events such as flooding and cyclones result in stagnant water, creating ideal breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes thus leading to a sharp upturn in infections and deaths in the affected regions.

Sands claimed that the alarming escalation of cases resulting from climate-driven weather disasters underscores the urgent need for proactive measures.

“What we’ve seen in places like Pakistan and Malawi is real evidence of the impact that climate change is having on malaria,” he said.

“So you have these extreme weather events, whether flooding in Pakistan, or the cyclone in Malawi, leaving lots of stagnant water around the place. And we saw a very sharp uptick in infections and deaths from malaria in both places,” he said

His comments follow what a number of health experts have claimed is significant progress in providing a vaccine for the diseases. In 2019, doctors in sub-Saharan Africa began immunizing children with the world’s first malaria vaccine.

RTS,S, has been administered to over one million children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi since 2019, following positive results from immunization efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Optimism

The World Health Organization recommended the expanded use of RTS,S among children residing in regions with moderate to high malaria transmission in October 2021, estimating that widespread deployment of the vaccine could save the lives of an additional 40,000 to 80,000 African children annually.

There is optimism that the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, recently approved by Ghana and Nigeria, will be produced within Africa in the near future.

The R21/Matrix-M vaccine, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII), received approval from Ghana’s Food and Drugs Authority for use in children aged five months to three years old, the age group most vulnerable to malaria-related fatalities.

However this vaccine has not yet been given World Health Organization (WHO) prequalification approval. 

The Serum Institute of India, the license holder for manufacturing and commercialization of the R21/Matrix-M vaccine, hailed Ghana’s approval as a crucial milestone in helping Ghanaian and African children to effectively combat malaria.

But Sands warned against seeing that immunisations as a “silver bullet” because a child still dies from the disease every minute.