Vaccine for Dengue fever by 2015

BANGKOK: A vaccine for dengue fever could be a reality by 2015 - bringing relief to countries like Thailand where the disease strikes millions each year.

For the estimated 220 million people infected annually, dengue fever starts with only a small mosquito bite.

Two million children a year develop a potentially deadly form of the disease.

More than 70 per cent of the world's population at risk for dengue fever live in ASEAN countries, and the month of June is peak dengue season.

Dengue has become an epidemic due to unprecedented population growth, lack of effective mosquito control, and unchecked urbanization.

Health consequences aside, families are often faced with the economic burden of treatment.

In Thailand's Ratchaburi province which has some of the highest incidences of dengue in the Kingdom, Sanofi Pasteur and Mahidol University are spearheading the world's first efficacy trial for a dengue vaccine.

So far, there is reason for hope.

"Its really quite exciting working on the challenging vaccine, but also thinking that at the end, the deliverable for us, the team at Sanofi Pasteur, will be the vaccine that will help the children and the parents for the 200 million plus that had dengue last year," said Dr Jean Lang, the Sanofi Pasteur Dengue Vaccine Program head.

4,000 children are participating in the four-year study.

They'll each receive three injections spaced six months apart.

Results of the trial are expected by 2012.

If its approved, Singapore could well be one of the first countries to take advantage.

"The Singapore government has maintained the mosquito control, but at the same time the population has become more susceptible, so as you have higher susceptibility, it takes fewer mosquitos to transmit epidemics," said Professor Duane J Gubler, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore.

Air travel has also made the city state susceptible to dengue outbreaks.

"Singapore lives in a sea of dengue. All of the countries around Singapore (such as) Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines all have massive epidemics of dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever," said Professor Gubler.

A vaccine for dengue fever could be available by 2015.

SOURCE:
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/imagegallery/store/phpA0wanx.jpg

Comments

Reasons Why Your Hips Hurt

Hips Don't lie Inside the Joint Each hip is a ball-and-socket joint. The ball is the top of your thighbone (femoral head). The socket (acetabulum) is in your pelvic bone. Smooth, slippery tissue called cartilage lets the ball and socket glide against each other when you move. A thin lining (synovium) tops the cartilage and makes a bit of synovial fluid, which further eases rubbing. Tendons, ligaments, and muscles complete the joint. Osteoarthritis It’s the “wear and tear” type of arthritis that many people get in middle age. Cartilage on the ball end of the thighbone and in the hip socket slowly breaks down and causes grinding between bones. You’ll have stiffness, and you might feel pain in your crotch and at the front of your thigh that radiates to your knee and behind. It’s often worse after a hard workout or when you don’t move for a while. Rheumatoid Arthritis With RA, your immune system attacks parts of your body, which can include the syn...

Have Flu-Like Symptoms? Could Be a Semen Allergy

A mysterious syndrome in which men come down with a flu-like illness after an orgasm may be caused by an allergy to semen, Dutch scientists said Monday. Men with the condition, known as post orgasmic illness syndrome or POIS and documented in medical journals since 2002, get flu-like symptoms such as feverishness, runny nose, extreme fatigue and burning eyes immediately after they ejaculate. Symptoms can last for up to week. Marcel Waldinger, a professor of sexual psychopharmacology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, published two studies which suggest that men with POIS have an allergy to their own semen, and that a treatment known as hyposensitisation therapy can help reduce its impact. "These results are a very important breakthrough in the research of this syndrome," Waldinger said in a telephone interview. He said the findings "contradict the idea that the complaints have a psychological cause" and show that an auto-allergic reaction to semen is th...

New, Noninvasive Paternity Test Developed

Identify the father of a baby as early as the eighth week of pregnancy . The new method, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine , uses fetal DNA isolated from the mother's blood. The test has already been used to prove an affair in a murder trial, and experts say it has other significant medical and legal applications. "The technology is extremely important and really a very, very significant step forward for medical prenatal diagnosis," says Peter Benn, PhD, director of the diagnostic medical genetics laboratories at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. He was not involved in the research. A previous study by the same researchers showed how the test could be used early in pregnancy to determine whether a fetus has Down syndrome , for example. "That technology will allow genetic disorders to be identified without going through amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling . That's a very important and useful step forward b...

Life, Health and Enjoyment

Search This Blog