World’s first dengue vaccine approved for use in Mexico

Sanofi India shares advanced almost 5 per cent to hit intraday high of Rs 4,450 after the Mexican government approved the world’s first anti-dengue vaccine developed by France-based Sanofi Pasteur which is an arm of the India-listed Sanofi India.

Mexico’s approval of the vaccine comes as Hawaii battles the largest outbreak of the mosquito-borne illness in the state since the 1940s.

Mexico said the vaccine is aimed at people aged 9 to 45 and will be used in areas where the disease is endemic. “Today, with this first marketing authorization of Dengvaxia, we have achieved our goal of making dengue the next vaccine-preventable disease”.

Dr. In-Kyu Yoon, director of the worldwide Dengue Vaccine Initiative, said the drug “may potentially have a significant public health impact”, but noted “we still don’t know how much Sanofi will charge”.

Dengue fever, which kills about 100 people a year in Mexico, has challenged medical professionals because it has four separate viral strains, and any vaccine needed to address all of those, according to AFP.

Dengue has always been a world health problem, and for the first time, a vaccine for the disease has been approved for use by Mexico, dubbed Dengvaxia. More than a dozen other countries are considering approval, according to Bloomberg News. Severe dengue affects most southeast Asian and Latin American countries, where in some of them it has become a leading cause of hospitalization and death among children.

Though the 60.8 percent effectiveness rate is quite low for a common vaccine, which generally is at 95 percent, Dengvaxia is different because it shows great effectiveness in terms of curing the most deadly type of dengue called dengue haemorrhagic fever. According to him, clinical studies show that the vaccine is less effective for children under this age. Sanofi Pasteur is the vaccines division of Sanofi which provides more than 1 billion doses of vaccine each year to fight against 20 infectious diseases.

“The evidence from the vaccine trials is that it can prevent hospitalisation for about 80 percent of those who get vaccinated”, Cameron Simmons, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Melbourne, told Al Jazeera.