Major public health bodies call for meningitis vaccine production hike

Major public health organizations on Tuesday called on vaccine manufacturers to step up meningitis vaccine production as the Africa faces risk of a large meningitis outbreak.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) said in a statement that an acute shortage of meningitis C-containing vaccine in Africa threatens to severely limit the world's ability to minimize the number of people affected.

According to statistics, there have been 12,000 cases, including 800 deaths, of meningitis C in Niger and Nigeria in the half of 2015.

Olivier Ronveaux, from the Department of Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases at WHO, told a press conference that Africa is at risk of a large outbreak of meningitis next year because meningitis occurs in cycles, with big epidemics hitting African countries every five to six years.

At the same time, there has been a critical shortage of vaccine. WHO said that there have been repeated talks with manufacturers of the vaccine to try to persuade them to revise their production plans to meet demand but so far there has been no progress.

The organizations called on manufacturers to produce a stockpile of five million doses of vaccine so as to be ready for flare-ups of the disease next year in Africa.

They said while substantial progress has been made in recent years in protecting Africa from other main sub-types of meningitis, however, much work needs to be done to protect the African meningitis belt from meningitis C outbreaks. Enditem