Dengue Vaccine 100 Percent Effective in Small Study Will Dunham - Reuters
go to original March 16, 2016

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are seen at the Laboratory of Entomology and Ecology of the Dengue Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in San Juan. (Reuters/Alvin Baez)

A dengue vaccine developed by U.S. National Institutes of Health scientists protected everyone given the shot against the virus in a promising small study published on Wednesday, with the researchers saying it could become widely available by 2018.

The scientists also expressed optimism that the approach they used for the dengue vaccine could work in creating a vaccine against the Zika virus, which is in the same viral family and spread by the same mosquito species. Zika, linked to numerous cases of the birth defect microcephaly in Brazil, is spreading rapidly in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Researchers administered the single-dose vaccine, called TV003, to a group of volunteers and six months later exposed them to dengue-2, one of the four different strains of the virus.

All 21 people given the vaccine were protected from infection. All 20 people given a placebo injection developed dengue infection after being exposed to the virus. Everyone in the placebo group had the virus in their blood, 80 percent developed a rash and 20 percent exhibited low white blood cell counts.

The results were very promising and inspired "great confidence" that the vaccine will protect people in areas where dengue is endemic, said vaccine researcher Dr. Anna Durbin of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Dengue, found in the world's tropical and subtropical regions, infects nearly 400 million people in more than 120 countries annually. Most survive with few or no symptoms, but more than 2 million people annually develop dengue hemorrhagic fever, which kills more than 25,000 people each year.

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