Drugmakers urged to cut diarrhoea vaccine prices

Health experts at a conference on infectious diseases in the Malaysian capital urged drugmakers on Friday to cut prices of anti-diarrhoea vaccines sold to poorer nations so that more children could benefit from them.

There are now vaccines against the rotavirus, the most common cause of severe diarrhoea in young children and which kills more than 600,000 children worldwide each year, mostly in developing countries.

“The risk of dying from rotavirus is directly related to income or the level of health in your country, in terms of life expectancy,” said Roger Glass, director of the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States.

“We need to think of varying the costs of the vaccine for it to have a global impact,” Glass said at an international congress on infectious diseases in Kuala Lumpur.

More than 90 percent of deaths from rotavirus occur in Africa and Asia, with 100,000 deaths in India alone each year. Figures in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America stand at 150,000 and 20,000 respectively.

Currently there are two rotavirus vaccines in the market; GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s Rotarix and Merck & Co Inc’s RotaTeq.

While efficacy evaluations were still ongoing, Glass said preliminary surveillance seems to suggest that the vaccines have lower efficacy rates in poorer countries.

Bangladesh and South Africa show lower immune response, compared to Finland and countries in Latin America.

This could be due to malnourishment, less breastfeeding and higher interaction with bacteria-infested environment among children, Glass said.

“The biggest challenge is, will vaccines work in the low-income countries? Preliminary data suggest they might or might not. We really need figures and data to find out,” he said.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters)