Meningitis threat for Africa
2003-09-25 22:03
Geneva - Meningitis could claim thousands more lives in Africa if desperately needed vaccines are not ordered by the end of the month, the aid group Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders, MSF) warned on Thursday.
"MSF warns that thousands of lives could be lost in Africa if donors fail to fund the production of a new meningitis vaccine in the next two weeks," the aid agency said in a statement.
Under a deal with the World Health Organisation (WHO), British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has developed a cheap meningitis vaccine for African countries, priced at one euro per dose.
But six million doses would have to be ordered from the company by the end of September to prevent an epidemic, MSF said.
Providing funding once the epidemic season began - towards the end of this year or at the start of 2004 - would be too late because people had to be immunised at the outset and producing the vaccines required a minimum of three months, MSF said.
"This is one emergency that can be averted if action is taken now," the statement quoted Bernard Pecoul, director of MSF's Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, as saying.
"GSK has done the right things - the appropriate product is there, at a differential price. But where are the buyers?" demanded Pecoul.
"We are putting €1m on the table but this needs to be matched by other contributions in the next two weeks," he said.
The disease breaks out nearly every year in the African meningitis belt, which stretches from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west, covering 21 countries with an estimated total population of 350 million people.
The WHO says a strain of the disease known as W135 is a main cause of large-scale epidemics. It killed some 1 500 people in Burkina Faso alone last year.
At least six million doses of the new "trivalent" vaccine would be needed by January to reduce effectively the spread of meningitis in Africa, the United Nation's health body estimated in a recent report.
The stock would be managed by the International Co-ordinating Group - comprising the WHO, MSF, the International Federation of the Red Cross and the UN Children's Fund Unicef - which is in charge of providing vaccines to control meningitis epidemics.
"Because of production schedule needs, financial commitment needs to be secured as soon as possible and orders for these vaccines need to be placed with GSK by the end of September," the WHO report said.
The epidemic season in 2003 generated 21 000 cases of meningitis and 2 800 deaths were reported, according to the WHO.
- SAPA