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Vaccines are relatively new tools in the fight against malaria. They don't provide perfect protection, but new research involving two tropical cyclones suggests they could be especially important in a warmer, stormier world. NPR's Jonathan Lambert has more.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: Benjamin Rice didn't set out to study how climate change could affect malaria. In 2021, the Princeton University biologist and his colleagues began collecting basic data about the disease in Madagascar to figure out how to combat it there. But over the next two years, the island got hit with massive back-to-back cyclones.
BENJAMIN RICE: Damaged waterways, impassible roads, crops destroyed. Like, it was a - it was like a straight-up catastrophe.
LAMBERT: That catastrophe disrupted malaria control programs. Distribution systems for antimalarial drugs or bed nets that keep mosquitoes from biting at night stalled out. At first, Rice worried the storms would make it harder to understand how malaria was spreading. But it soon became clear that the storms were the story.
RICE: We had 500 households, and we would just sample them every two months, every two months, every two months, every two months. And then we had some sample points before and after the storms.
LAMBERT: They found that in the two months after a storm, up to half of school-aged children and over a third of younger kids were infected in some areas. They say disruptions to control programs are likely to blame.
RICE: These sort of, like, periods of disruption, even if they're brief, there's so much malaria transmission happening that you would quickly lose any, like, progress you've made in controlling malaria.
LAMBERT: But there's some good news. The researchers think that newly available malaria vaccines could add a layer of storm-proof protection. They estimate that vaccinating 70% of children before the storms would have cut symptomatic infections by about half. That modeling impressed Kelly Searle, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota who wasn't involved in the study.
KELLY SEARLE: These vaccines, they're not perfect in terms of their efficacy, but they're actually pretty good. And so if you bring those in, you can have that immunity, and you can reduce the risk of malaria in the aftermath of these storms.
LAMBERT: Storms like these are expected to become even more severe because of climate change. Searle says this study shows how malaria vaccines could help countries prepare and make their control programs more climate proof. But in the face of shrinking foreign aid budgets, more storms could hit before health systems get these extra layers in place. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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