Malaria
600 thousand deaths per year
Vaccine: yes, since 2021
Owner: GSK (Belgium)
Malaria has been high on the list of known fatal diseases for about twenty years. There has been a vaccine against it for several years, with a patent from the Belgian GSK that will expire in 2029, but it is not flawless: children must be given four doses of 9.30 euros each to have only a 30 percent lower risk of disease . This makes it an expensive investment for relatively little protection.
Malaria, like tuberculosis, hardly occurs in richer countries. The annual investment of 550 million euros in malaria research shows that it is not a priority for those countries. They prefer to ‘contain’ the disease rather than ‘eradicate’ it. But as long as a disease exists, there is also a chance that it will evolve and as corona showed, it is very difficult to limit travel and migration. The European Climate and Health Observatory already warns that malaria mosquitoes will increasingly survive in Europe due to the climate crisis.
Dengue
36 thousand deaths per year
Vaccine: yes, since 2015
Patent: Sanofi Pasteur (FR)
What applies to malaria and tuberculosis applies even more to dengue. This disease is common in Central America and Southeast Asia, but it receives little attention worldwide. In 2020, only one million euros was invested in dengue research.
A dengue vaccine has been on the market since 2015, but it is about 70 percent effective and currently costs around 100 euros. In addition, people who have never contracted Dengue can become seriously ill from the vaccine. For these reasons, it is currently only applied in areas where many cases of Dengue are recorded, to contain the spread of the disease as much as possible.
The measles
134 thousand deaths per year
Vaccine: yes
Patent: no more patent owners (since 1981)
Even if a good vaccine exists and there are no companies that keep it to themselves with patents, it can still be difficult to combat a disease. A good example of this is measles, a disease that has almost completely disappeared from the world for a long time. In stable countries, measles is rare thanks to vaccination campaigns, but just as peace strengthens public health, war, disasters and forced migration strengthen disease by weakening healthcare infrastructure. That is why the World Health Organization (WHO) quickly set up a measles vaccination program there after the floods in Pakistan.
 keep deadly diseases in the world){kind=link}