Biggest Yellow Fever Outbreak In Brazil In Decades; Global Vaccine Supply Nearly Depleted
Yellow fever has broken out in the jungles outside Brazil’s most densely-populated cities, raising a frightening but still remote possibility: an epidemic that could decimate that country’s population and spread throughout the Americas, including the United States. In an essay rushed into print by the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, two doctors from the National Institutes of Health warn that cases of yellow fever, which can kill as many as 10% of those infected, have seen an unusual spike in the last few weeks in several rural areas of Brazil.
Those outbreaks have been limited to places where there aren’t enough people or virus-spreading mosquitoes to fuel a rapid run-up in transmission. But they are on the edge of major urban areas where residents are largely unvaccinated, and where both humans and insects are packed densely enough to accelerate the disease’s spread.
It’s a perilous moment, made more so by the fact that, while an effective vaccine against yellow fever has been around since 1937, worldwide stockpiles are all but depleted. In a series of yellow fever outbreaks in Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo two years ago, public health officials ran so short of the vaccine that they resorted to giving each person one-fifth of a dose.
Only a few companies worldwide manufacture the vaccine, and making additional doses takes a long time, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and coauthor of the new essay. In the virtual absence of stockpiled vaccine, wrote Fauci and Dr. Catharine I. Paules, “early identification of cases and rapid implementation of public health management and prevention strategies, such as mosquito control and appropriate vaccination, are critical” to preventing an explosion of yellow fever.
EDIT
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1127