Deadly meningitis strain virtually eliminated in much of Africa: study

A new vaccine has virtually eliminated meningitis A in 16 African countries, but children will remain vulnerable to the disease which can kill or cause severe brain damage, unless governments routinely immunise them, experts said on Tuesday. Some 237 million people have been vaccinated since 2010 in a one-off mass campaign across Africa’s meningitis belt, which stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, according to the Meningitis Vaccine Project, a partnership between the World Health Organization and the charity PATH. "The disease has completely disappeared from the areas where the vaccine was introduced,“ Marie-Pierre Preziosi, director of the project, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

It not only killed a lot of kids but it would often leave families and communities and health systems taking care of lots of very neurologically damaged kids.

Steve Davis, head of PATH

Vaccination is one of the most effective public health interventions. But the public sector usually needs to provide incentives to the private sector to develop vaccines for diseases that only affect poor populations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made a $70 million grant in 2001 to develop and test MenAfriVac. It is being manufactured by a private company, Serum Institute of India. "This has proven to be quite a model for other vaccines,” said Preziosi.

Should we not introduce the vaccine into routine immunisations, in about 15 years from now, there will be a massive epidemic.

Marie-Pierre Preziosi