May 17 2011
France's Sanofi-Pasteur, the world's largest vaccine maker, said Friday it hopes to introduce a dengue vaccine in 2014 to some high-risk nations, AlertNet reports. The vaccine is in the last stage of clinical testing in Australia, and the company said it hopes to produce 100 million doses of the vaccine annually, according to the news agency.
More than half of the world's population is at risk of the mosquito-borne disease, and there currently is no cure or vaccine. An estimated 220 million infections occur worldwide each year, and about two million people, mostly children in Asia and Latin America, develop a serious form of the disease called dengue hemorrhagic fever, AlertNet notes (Girardon, 5/13).
This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente. |