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May 7, 2005
Why it's hard to vaccinate against dengue
Westerners travelling to Southeast Asia have to worry about a number of different diseases that aren't common in the US and Europe. You can get vaccinated against yellow fever and take prophylactic antimalarial drugs, but there's one mosquito-borne disease that we can't do much about: dengue fever. If you're going to an area where dengue is endemic the best advice is to cover up and wear high DEET percentage insect repellent.The reason we don't have a vaccine for dengue is rather interesting. There are four different dengue strains: DEN-1 through DEN-4. There's some evidence that if you are infected with one serotype and recover and then are infected with a second serotype, the infection is worse. As a result, a candidate vaccine needs to protect against all four serotypes. This turns out to be harder to make than a vaccine against just one serotype, though Acambis has a vaccine in development.
Credit: Linda Zadik alerted me to this issue.
Posted by ekr at May 7, 2005 9:42 PM | Filed under:
Comments
Check out one traveller's experience with dengue fever here -- http://www.honan.net/2003_02_01_archive2.php . It's awful, apparently: 'Harper later described the sensation as one of having someone scrape your bones with a knife, and that sounds about right.'
Of course, don't underestimate the market effects that tend to mean dengue is a low priority -- it affects predominantly people in SE Asia, who are poor and can't afford expensive medicine, so there's little impetus for a commercial drug company to perform R&D on anti-dengue drugs.
Posted by: Justin Mason at May 9, 2005 12:18 PM