New York: An inexpensive, little-known cholera vaccine appears to work so well that it can protect entire communities and perhaps head off explosive epidemics like the one that killed nearly 10,000 Haitians in 2010.
A major study published on Wednesday in The Lancet found that the vaccine gave individuals more than 50 percent protection against cholera and reduced life-threatening episodes of the infection by about 40 percent in Bangladesh, where the disease has persisted for centuries
In a result that surprised researchers, the vaccine worked far better than supplying families with chlorine for their water and soap for hand-washing.
The study is “really very important, and testing it in 270,000 people is phenomenal,” said Dr Louise Ivers, a health policy adviser at Partners in Health, a medical charity that fights cholera in Haiti.
“In the last five years, the conversation has switched from ‘we shouldn’t use vaccine’ to ‘How can we use it best?'”
Dr Eric Mintz, a cholera expert at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said the study “shows that the vaccine is feasible for government medical care”.
Cholera, which causes severe diarrhoea, kills about 91,000 people a year, most of them children. It is endemic in more than 50 countries, mostly in Asia and Africa.
When the infection unexpectedly spreads to a new country where no one has immunity – as it did after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, and in Zimbabwe in 2008 – it can overwhelm health systems and kill thousands within months.
The surprisingly effective vaccine, called Shanchol, has been slow to gain acceptance.
It is based on a vaccine first made in Vietnam, then improved in the 1990s at the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, South Korea. Shanchol has been made by Shantha Biotechnics in India since 2009.
The vaccine’s protection lasts at least five years and perhaps longer, although that has not been proven yet.
It contains two killed disease-causing strains of cholera bacteria, is taken orally, and comes in a bottle about the size of a typical “energy shot”. The two-dose regimen costs $5. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which paid for much of the research, hopes to get the price below $2.70 as production increases.
New York Times