With more than one million people dying of malaria each year, two new global strategies have been initiated to tackle this deadly disease. At the Global Vaccine Research Forum in Bangkok, the WHO (World Health Organization) announced the launch of the Roadmap — a global effort that promises to accelerate the development of an effective vaccine against malaria (WHO, 4 December 2006). This launch coincides with the creation, by researchers in Kenya and Britain, of a real map — the Malaria Atlas Project — that pinpoints locations where malaria is most likely to strike (BBC News, 5 December 2006).

The WHO Roadmap calls on scientists, funding organizations and policy experts to work together to develop a malaria vaccine. According to Marie-Paule Kieny, a WHO director, “The Roadmap marks the first concerted global attempt at mapping out a shared plan of action for making a preventive malaria vaccine reality.” (Reuters, 4 December 2006)

The Roadmap aims to have a first-generation vaccine that is >50% effective and is protective for longer than 1 year by 2015, and a vaccine that is >80% effective and provides protection for longer than 4 years by 2025. To achieve this, the WHO Roadmap recommends standardizing procedures for the assessment of vaccine candidates, broadening the search for a vaccine, improving the capacity for clinical trials in Africa and other malaria-endemic areas, and securing sustainable funding (ScientificAmerican.com, 4 December 2006).

As its creators discuss in an article in PLoS Medicine, the Malaria Atlas Project will also help in the fight against malaria by enabling individual countries to calculate malaria infection rates, in targeting intervention needs and in measuring progress on a global scale (PLoS Medicine, 5 December 2006).