In this era of orphan-everything, it’s important to note the societal impact of disease-eradicating inoculation — as evidenced by the outstanding performance of cholera vaccine Shanchol.
A broadscale study published this week in The Lancet found that the vaccine improves individuals’ susceptibility to cholera by 65 percent. It reduced life-threatening episodes by about 40 percent in Bangladesh — a country where the disease has long persisted, as the The New York Times points out:
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 C. Ivers, a health policy adviser at Partners in Health, a medical charity that fights AIDS in Haiti and switched to treating cholera there after the earthquake.
“In the last five years, the conversation has switched from ‘We shouldn’t use vaccine’ to ‘How can we use it best?’ ”
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Despite its efficacy — it lasts at least five years and possibly longer — Shanchol is a largely neglected vaccine. It’s cheap — the two required doses cost about $3.70 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who backed much of its research, want to bring the cost down to $2 per dose as production increases, The New York Times says.
During the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti, many wanted to put Shanchol into action but, as in the case of many of last year’s Ebola therapies, the vaccine had not yet been approved by the World Health Organization.
The vaccine has been made by Shantha Biotechnics in India since 2009, the New York Times says — though it’s based on a vaccine first developed in Vietnam in the 1990s.
