UN agency rushes vaccines to avert possible spread of meningitis in Burkina Faso

A rare strain of meningitis, which only two years ago killed 1,500 people in Burkina Faso, is now being controlled thanks to a coordinated strategy to produce a matching vaccine in record time, thus averting a possible “enormous tragedy,” the United Nations health agency announced today.

"At last, we have the tools to contain small outbreaks like this one before they cripple an entire region," the coordinator of the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) Global Alert and Response unit, Michael J. Ryan, said following a new outbreak in recent weeks.

"Every part of the public health network pulled together to build this system," Dr. Ryan added. "Humanitarian organizations, industry, international agencies, lab trainers and private contributors have all worked together, and through their combined efforts an enormous tragedy in Africa may have been averted."

Meningitis, an inflammation of the coverings of the brain and/or spinal cord, sweeps across sub-Saharan Africa every year, sometimes triggering outbreaks involving 100,000 people or more. But mass response plans had been successful in limiting outbreaks until two years ago when the W135 strain emerged in Burkina Faso, infecting 13,000 people, 1,500 of them fatally, before the outbreak burned itself out.

WHO at once started organizing partnerships to build a "mass intervention delivery system" to combat W135, and laboratory workers and field epidemiologists were trained and supplied with materials to rapidly detect and track the strain.

At the same time, pharmaceutical partner GlaxoSmithKline developed a new vaccine that was tested and approved in record time. Following negotiations with WHO, the company priced the vaccine affordably, at one Euro a dose.

After an urgent WHO appeal in September, funds came in from the governments of Ireland, Italy, Monaco and the United Kingdom, and from Médecins Sans Frontières, the Norwegian Red Cross, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and private individuals to purchase an emergency stockpile, which is now ready for the new outbreak. The first doses will be used in Burkina Faso in the next few days.

But WHO said funds were still needed for injection materials and supplies and to finance other aspects of future vaccine campaigns.