By Celia W. Dugger (The N.Y. Times)
For over a century, epidemics of bacterial meningitis have swept across Africa, arriving with the dry harmattan winds to kill with terrifying speed. But on Monday, a drive will start to inoculate tens of millions of West Africans with a new vaccine in what scientists hope will be the beginning of the end of ravaging meningitis epidemics.
The aim is for these immunization campaigns to spread from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east and bring the disease under control in a belt of 25 nations that girds the continent, saving an estimated 150,000 lives by 2015.
Hundreds of millions more dollars are still needed to accomplish that goal in coming years, public health officials say. But the meningitis vaccine itself is a major milestone in developing inexpensive immunizations against neglected diseases that afflict poor countries, experts say.
More than a million cases of meningitis have been reported in Africa over the past two decades. The vaccine works against the group A meningitis strain that causes more than 8 out of 10 cases on the continent. Moreover, it costs less than 50 cents a dose. In the United States, Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur market a single dose of meningitis vaccine against multiple strains of the disease for $80 to $100.
"Wow, that’s remarkable!" exclaimed Dr. Gregory Poland, head of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, when he heard how little the new vaccine would cost.
Bill Gates, whose foundation largely financed the endeavor, contrasted the undertaking with the development of vaccines for measles, smallpox and polio.
"All those things were created because rich people got sick," the billionaire Microsoft co-founder said. "This is the first vaccine that went through the whole process where there was no rich world market, and it had to be optimized at a very low price."
The meningitis vaccine relies on a technology that was devised by researchers at the Food and Drug Administration and donated by the U.S. government at the cost of only token royalties. It is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, a major vaccine producer, and it was developed independently of the major American and European pharmaceutical companies.
The meningitis vaccination drives will begin Monday in Burkina Faso and will also get under way in Mali and Niger this month, but public health experts caution that the promise of the meningitis vaccine should not be oversold. It will not eradicate the disease because it is effective only against the group A strain most common in Africa.
