The vaccine campaign which started four years ago will help to prevent the disease and has greatly reduced malaria prevalence in the country, Jallow stated. “Since we started this program four years ago, we have seen a remarkable improvement in the prevention of malaria as far as the under 5-year-old kids are concerned, and as we speak, we are less than 1 percent prevalence in this region,” he added.
But he correlated the challenges faced by them during the giving out of the vaccines to communities in his region such as lack of mobility and good road networks to reach various vulnerable communities.The village of Kerr Ousman Boye was the first port of call for the team giving out the malaria vaccines – about a kilometer to the southern region of Senegal where almost all the villagers are farmers.
Gibel Boye, the Village Health Worker, said: “we have seen the impact of the vaccines since we began benefitting from them.” He said the malaria prevalence has drastically reduced due to the chemoprevention vaccine.
Yama Sarr is one of the children to benefit from the vaccine and her grandmother, Kaddy Sallah, and Ebrima Baldeh, father of two other kids who were vaccinated at Sarre Futaboth. They expressed their delight about the vaccines that had protected their kids from being infected with malaria.