Dengue Vaccine Should Be Used With Caution In Nations With Low Disease Prevalence, Study Shows

CNN: New dengue vaccine could instead cause more cases, experts warn
“This may go against what typically comes to mind when you think about vaccines, but the newly licensed vaccine against the dengue virus — trade name Dengvaxia — could lead to an increase in the number of cases of the disease if not implemented correctly, experts warn in a new study. … [I]n the new study, published Thursday, Ferguson used data from [previously conducted] clinical trials to assess the impact of using the vaccine in different settings and found that its use in areas with low levels of disease, where people are unlikely to have been previously exposed to dengue, could lead to an increase in people severely affected by the infection due to the complexities of the virus and the way it interacts with our immune system…” (Senthilingam, 9/1).

VOA News: Dengue Fever Vaccine Could Cause Severe Illness
“…In countries with a high prevalence of the disease, [Isabel Rodriguez-Barraquer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the study’s primary authors,] said, the vaccine should not be a problem. Investigators concluded Dengvaxia can reduce severe illness and hospitalizations by 20 percent to 30 percent in such places. But in countries with a low prevalence, where only 10 percent of the population has been previously infected with dengue, the vaccine ought to be used with caution. Ideally, Rodriguez-Barraquer said, people should be tested before being vaccinated, to see whether they have been infected by dengue in the past…” (Berman, 9/1).

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