UN health agency launches its first ever mass cholera vaccination campaign

The United Nations health agency has launched its broadest mass cholera vaccination campaign to date in its first-ever effort to use oral vaccine as part of an overall strategy to control the disease, which infects up to 200,000 people worldwide each year, killing at least 5,000.

The project is being conducted in the town of Beira, Mozambique, a community with particularly high levels of cholera, by the UN World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the country’s Ministry of Health, the non-governmental Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Epicentre and the International Vaccine Institute.

While current campaigns, which focus on providing care to the sick and providing safe water, can prevent many deaths, the lack of strong preventative measures means the disease is still a major public health problem in some 50 resource-poor countries, the Geneva-based WHO said today.

Though it is unlikely cholera will ever be eliminated by using traditional strategies together with vaccines, there is now greater potential to significantly decrease the disease's incidence in high risk populations, WHO added. Many lives will certainly be saved, but perhaps even more importantly, the public health system may soon have another tool at its disposal to fight cholera.

Cholera is mainly contracted through consumption of contaminated food or water and epidemics are linked to poor hygiene, overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and unsafe water.

The Beira campaign will finish by the end of the month with about 50,000 people vaccinated, and the first results of this effort will be obtained within a year, WHO said.

The vaccine itself has been available for 10 years, but the agency said this was the first time it had been used so broadly to minimize the devastation of a cholera outbreak. It is also the first time that WHO has considered the use of the oral cholera vaccine as part of an overall strategy.

In recent years, the number of reported cholera cases worldwide has varied between 110,000 and 200,000 cases annually. Officially 5,000 deaths occur each year, but WHO estimates that the true number is probably significantly higher, due to under-reporting of cases and gaps in surveillance.