Vaccine to hit disease in 25 African nations

Epidemics of bacterial meningitis have swept across Africa for more than a century, inward with the dry harmattan winds to kill with terrifying speed. But today a drive starts to inoculate tens of millions of West Africans with a latest vaccine in what scientists hope will be the beginning of the end of ravaging meningitis epidemics. The aim is for immunization to extend, from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, and bring the disease under control in a belt of 25 nations that girds the continent, saving an predictable 150,000 lives by 2015.

Hundreds of millions more dollars are still wanted to accomplish that goal, but the meningitis vaccine itself is a milestone in developing cheap vaccines against neglected diseases that afflict poor countries, experts say. More than 1 million cases of meningitis have been report in Africa over the past two decades. The vaccine works beside the group a meningitis strain that cause more than eight out of 10 cases on the continent. Bill Gates, whose foundation mainly financed the Endeavour, contrasted the undertaking with the growth of vaccines for measles, smallpox and polio.

''All those things were shaped because rich people got sick,'' he said. ''This is the first vaccine that goes through the entire process where there was no rich world market, and it had to be optimized at a very low price.'' The meningitis vaccination drives begin today in Burkina Faso and will also obtain under way in Mali and Niger this month. So far, donors and African countries have raise $US95 million of the estimated $US570 million cost, World Health Organization officials say. But the global financial disaster has pinched foreign aid spending, departure the remainder in doubt.

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Acute polio outbreak kills almost 100 in Congo: WHO

The crippling viral disease usually strikes children under five years of age, making the acute, fast-spreading outbreak abnormal, the U.N. agency said. "Most of the cases have concerned young adults aged between 15 and 29. This illustrates that populations are at risk because they have not been exposed to a full vaccination," it said. It marks the newest setback to a global campaign begun more than 20 years ago to wipe out polio, for which there is no cure, only defensive vaccines. The death toll in the central African state is 97 with a further 226 people paralyzed, and the majority victims are in the port city of Pointe Noire. The mortality rate is advanced than normal for the disease, which attacks the nervous system.

The virus is now confirmed as having reach Congo from Angola after it also extend to the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year, WHO spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer said. It comes from damage from India, one of four residual endemic countries where the virus survives and its spread has never been interrupted along with Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. A first wave of mass polio immunization campaigns, targeting 3 million people of all ages, is put to begin on Friday in Congo and part of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. "This way we can be certain that everybody is reached, including young adults, whose protection may be low," said Luis Sambo, WHO's regional director for Africa.

The WHO warned final month that a persistent outbreak of polio that began in Angola in 2007 could spread globally due to poorly managed vaccination campaigns. An epidemic this year in Tajikistan, a Central Asian state, accounts for 458 of 767 cases definite so far in 19 countries, Rosenbauer said. There were 1,604 cases worldwide in 2009. Pakistan is the only endemic country to have advanced numbers of cases this year, with 111 beside 76 at this time last year, he said. Record floods and poor sanitation are blamed. Namibia had a polio outbreak among adults in 2006 but direct to stop it’s extending within 50 days. 

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