WHO to provide meningitis vaccine

The World health organisation (WHO) is to provide 500,000 doses of vaccines to help Burkina Faso control a new strain of meningitis. A first shipment of 100,000 doses is expected in the capital, Ouagadougou, in the next days, WHO officials told IRIN. The W135 strain has killed 244 people out of 1349 infected in the 2002-2003 meningitis season. "WHO has obtained the license to make the vaccines available to contain a possible epidemic," the WHO representative in Burkina Faso, Mohamed Hacem, said on Sunday. The Burkinabe health ministry on Friday reported 369 cases of meningitis, including 58 people deaths, between 26 January and 2 February. The disease had reached epidemic proportions in four of the country's 53 districts, while seven were in the alert phase, said the ministry. The expected vaccines are part of the response to new outbreaks in Africa's meningitis belt by WHO and its partners in the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision for Epidemic Meningitis Control. They can be used against the A, C and W135 strains of the disease. "We will be vaccinating around affected areas," Hacem said. The new vaccine, he added, costs US$ 1.50 per dose. A vaccine covering only the W135 strain exists, but it costs between $5 and $50 per dose, which places it out of the reach of most affected countries. WHO said three million doses of the W135 vaccine will also be made available to the 21 countries in the meningitis belt, which stretches from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west. Meningitis is a disease affecting mostly children. Its main symptoms are fever, nausea and headache, which can progress rapidly to cause serious neurological damage, deafness, coma and death. Unless it is treated, up to half of those infected die. Even with treatment, as many as 20 percent of patients do not survive.