Hopes in Africa of a decline in infant deaths from diarrhoea have been raised by a study that found a 61.2% reduction in deaths among babies given the RotarixTM vaccine. The research results were cited as one of the reasons why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have committed US$10 billion over the next 10 years to vaccines.

The fund, announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January, will assist the governments of very-low income countries to make Rotarix and other life-saving vaccines available to children.

The research, published in December in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported on a clinical trial involving nearly 5,000 infants from high mortality, low-income settings in South Africa and Malawi. Its aim was to examine the efficiency of the vaccine among infants during the first year of life.

Rotavirus causes severe diarrhoea in children under the age of five in both developed and developing countries, and especially in Africa.

"The priority is to ensure that children in Africa, who account for 40% of the 530,000 deaths that occur annually from rotavirus, gain access to this life-saving vaccine," Professor Shabir Madhi, the clinical trial study author and a professor of vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) told University World News.

Sub-Saharan Africa has around 18% of the world's under-five population. "The expeditious introduction of rotavirus vaccine in Sub-Saharan African countries would therefore result in significant inroads being made in reducing under-five deaths and assisting countries in achieving the UN millennium developmental goal of reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds compared to 1990 levels," he said.

Madhi said that while progress in combating the illness was being made in South Africa, where the vaccine became available in the public immunization programme in 2009, the same is not true in other African countries.

The potential life-saving value of the vaccine was also revealed by a study in Mexico. That research, also recently published in the journal, analysed public health figures from 2007 to 2009 and found a two-thirds drop in diarrhoea-associated mortality.

The African clinical trial was supported through a partnership between drugs manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline and the Rotavirus Vaccine Trials Partnership - a collaboration between PATH, the World Health Organization and the US Centres for Disease Control.

Printable version
Email to a friend
Comment on this article

Disclaimer: All reader responses posted on this site are those of the reader ONLY and NOT those of University World News or Higher Education Web Publishing, their associated trademarks, websites and services. University World News or Higher Education Web Publishing does not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with any comments, opinions or statements or other content provided by readers.