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It’s a common disease and I experience many, many children die from malaria in my hand
as a physician. We have money to buy bed-nets. We have money
to buy mosquito screens, and yet my son have malaria. What about the little boy who lives
in a village probably has no bug or bed net and will probably take about 24 hours before
getting to the nearest health facility. What happens to such a child? We need to prevent
the child from getting malaria in the first place.
The best news for malaria research and development is that we are very close to get malaria vaccine.
So we are almost at three years before getting malaria vaccine. That is going to be available.
Malaria vaccine can be accessible even in remote areas for many, for all children in
Africa. So it’s going to be the key to it because children can be prevented at least
from the severe form of the disease. If we want to integrate a malaria vaccine
into public health policy, we need to plan for it now. We need to know what the challenges
are. We need to know where we’re going to get the money from. We need to know how feasible
it would be to integrate malaria vaccine into policy.
One of the problems we’ve been facing at MVI is how to help scientists that are well
connected in our field in Africa, to help them to convey a very important message of
research to policy-makers. That’s something that is extremely important and extremely
difficult to do. So if you wait until the vaccine is on the
market, it is going to take another five to ten years to prepare. By this time more children
will have died. It will be very sad to realize there is a vaccine that probably would have
saved those lives. We need to start engaging the media, engaging
policy-makers, engaging other sponsors. The time is now. We have to start.
So we need to make sure that all the people who need to know, get to know. And we need
to make sure that new money is found to add to the complement of resources that we have.
The malaria vaccine fellowship programs is all about creating chaplains for vaccine and
for vaccine research. During the training, fellows are interacting with policy-makers,
journalists, with specialists in communication to learn precise, concise, simple communications.
My whole aim is to get the health of people improved. I don’t think it’s good enough
to get some data, which may be good, and keep it on the shelf.
I see my job as helping to bridge the gap between research and policy. So that whatever
research results we find should be able to help shape policy and practice.
And help countries to make sure that as soon as the vaccine is available, countries will
hit the ground running. Bridging the gap between researchers and the
media and policy makers that is going to lead to superior vaccine that is going to save
lives. Twenty-four of those fellows have been trained already. And they are now known and
able to convey a crisp and neat message on research.
I’m really grateful for the opportunity to be a fellow for this advocacy program,
and I think that what I’ve learnt I would put it into practice and get things moving
and get things changing. We have so many tools that should be made available to the people
who really need it.