Hello and welcome to News Hour live from the BBC World Service in London. I'm Rebecca Kesby.

And for once, I'm delighted to say, we start the programme with some very positive news.

A medical breakthrough in the treatment of malaria. Well, in the treatment of malaria in babies and very small children at least,

and that's because a new soluble treatment has just been approved, specifically for babies.

It's the first time a malaria drug has been created for newborns, until now babies have either

not been treated or have been given very small amounts of drugs meant for older children,

but as well here, that's not ideal.

A short time ago, I spoke to Dr Caroline Bolton.

She's head of the Global Malaria Programme at Novartis,

which is the company behind the new drug.

She told me more about it.

Well, it is a really important new product for young babies with malaria

because it's the first malaria treatment that has been produced specially for this particular

patient population. And previously, the youngest babies in areas of malaria risk, when they

showed signs of malaria, they were given the products that

were designed for older children. And intuitively, you might think, okay, well, you just reduce the

dose, but actually young babies do not metabolize a number of drugs in the same way that adults do.

And that's the case for our particular anti-malarial. They get

extremely high levels of the active ingredients. And of course, that has the potential for toxicity.

And it's certainly not a great idea to overdose patients of that age group. So that's why we

decided to spend the time look for the right formulation to achieve

the right levels of the drugs in this youngest children, conduct a clinical trial. And actually,

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