Question: Does malaria have vaccine or treatment?

Alena Pance answered on 10 Jun 2020:

Hi Maria, there are several drugs to treat malaria, unfortunately these parasites are extremely crafty and they are becoming resistant to many of the drugs we have. A vaccine has been sought after for more than 50 years but again, the parasite has so far outwitted the attempts. There is a vaccine that has been licensed to be deployed in Africa but it has an efficacy of about 30%, which is low but better than no protection at all. The problem is that the parasite is genetically very diverse and so finding a universal target component of the parasite to develop a vaccine is prooving very difficult.