For første gang har et forsøg i Benin i Vestafrika vist, at det kan lade sig gøre at opbevare meningitis A vaccine i op til fire dage ved 40 graders varme uden at vaccinen taber sin virkning mod den frygtede hjernehindebetændelse.
DAKAR, 20 February 2014 (IRIN): A pilot meningitis A immunization campaign targeting more than 155,000 people in Benin with a vaccine that does not require constant refrigeration has demonstrated clear benefits, enabling wider reach, more efficient administration and potential cost reduction, researchers say.
Most vaccines must be kept cold, at temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, but the meningitis A vaccine known as MenAfriVac can be stored for up to four days at up to 40 degrees Celsius without any loss of potency, efficacy or safety.
Det giver muligheder for at nå mange flere
MenAfriVac, which was approved for use outside of the cold chain in October 2012, was used to vaccinate 155,596 people, aged 1 to 29, in 150 communities in northern Benin in December 2012.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says no cases of meningitis A were reported by the vaccinated population in 2013. The findings were recently published in the journal Vaccine.
“This is really quite revolutionary. This could really change the way mass vaccination campaigns are conducted in remote or low-resources settings,” said Marie-Pierre Preziosi, director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project, a partnership between WHO and global health NGO PATH, which drove the development of MenAfriVac.
MenAfriVac was first introduced in 2011 in a mass vaccination campaign in Africa’s meningitis belt, which stretches from Senegal to Ethiopia. To date, more than 150 million doses of MenAfriVac have been used to vaccinate people across 12 African countries.
But it was not until the Benin trial that the vaccine was administered outside of the cold chain.
Besværligt og dyrt at arbejde med kold-kæder i landområder
Michel Zaffran, coordinator of WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), said that it has been known since the early 1970s that a number of vaccines are relatively heat stable.
“Nevertheless, all of these are licensed for storage and use in the very strict temperature range of 2-8 degrees Celsius, which of course is fine for industrialized countries that have electricity and lots of equipment, but it’s actually sometimes quite challenging to achieve for developing countries,” he said.
Much of rural Africa lacks electricity, while power cuts are common in cities and daytime temperatures in most countries exceed 30 degrees. Many villages are too remote to be reached before vaccines spoil.
“The way it normally works is that the vaccines are refrigerated all the way to the district level, and then for that ‘last mile’ – which is often a lot more than a mile – you take those vaccines… and put them into a cold box with ice bags and temperature monitors, so that you can carry the insulated boxes… to the person being vaccinated,” said David Kaslow, the vice president of product development at PATH.
“So getting those freezer bags and ice, and making sure everything is the right temperature, putting them in boxes and all those sorts of things are very labour intensive and quite costly,” he explained.
Læs mere på: http://www.irinnews.org/report/99678/meningitis-vaccine-out-of-the-cold
