According to the results of a large clinical trial undertaken by Sanofi Pasteur, the drug’s manufacturer and the trial’s sponsor, the 20,000 people in Latin America, 10,000 of whom lived in México, who received three doses of the vaccine, reduced their overall risk of becoming infected by dengue fever by 60 percent. More significantly, the drug appears to be 95.5 percent protective against the most severe form of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever.
“There’s no vaccine for dengue currently, nor is there any specific treatment for managing illness in people who contract symptomatic dengue disease,” says Alain Bernal, a spokesperson for Sanofi Pasteur.
The researchers who conducted the first large clinical trial found that the vaccine was 56.6 percent effective against dengue, whereas results from a second clinical trial found that the vaccine reduced the incidence of dengue by 60.8 percent.
Scott Halstead, scientific adviser to the nonprofit Dengue Vaccine Initiative, told The New York Timesthat the results were “not anywhere close to what we had hoped, something that would reach up into the 90s.” And today, many researchers continue to express a need for a more effective vaccine.
According to Bernal, Sanofi Pasteur plans to file for registration of the vaccine in 2015, in countries where dengue is prevalent. That means that “the world’s first dengue vaccine could be available in the second half of 2015,” he says.
(from Milenio)
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