Written By: Debjani Arora | Published : November 25, 2017 5:23 PM IST
Dengue fever continues to be a public health nuisance for India. We are losing innocent lives to this condition at an alarming rate. The only way to control the spread of this epidemic is to curb the mosquito menace and restrict a number of people getting infected by this virus through this pest. But we are hopeful that other means of controlling deaths due to dengue might emerge soon. One of the proposed preventive measures is vaccination. There wasn t a vaccination in place to prevent dengue till date. Here are 10 steps for speedy recovery from dengue.
But some media reports have suggested that the pharma giant Panacea Biotec, has secured permission to do clinical trials in India in 2018 to test for the vitality of the vaccination for dengue they are coming up with. The permission was granted by Drug Controller General of India. The clinical trials are said to start in 2018 and the vaccine will be available mostly by end 2019. The mosquito-borne disease affects the platelet counts erodes immunity and causes deaths. This is why a vaccination can be of great help to lessen the number of deaths happening every year. Here are 10 practical tips to be mosquito free and fight dengue.
Panacea Biotec, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US, has developed the advanced dengue vaccine which promises safety and abides by the rules of preclinical studies. It is said that the single-dose shot vaccine has been found to stimulate a strong immune response against all four types of viruses in all age groups.
While we are eagerly waiting for a vaccination to come to the fore, in 2014 a group of scientists and researchers had expressed certain concerns about the dengue vaccination. Scientists have warned that dengue vaccines could cause short-term but major spikes in the years after they are first used. Jan Medlock, an assistant professor at Oregon State University said that their analysis suggested that if they developed and widely used a vaccine for dengue fever, there might later be spikes in the incidence of the disease that were two to three times higher than its normal level. The research was done by experts at the OSU College of Veterinary Medicine and Clemson University, both of which supported the studies. Scientists used mathematical modelling to examine the quirks of infectious disease transmission that may lead to this quandary. According to the researchers, the beginning of a vaccination program would slow the numbers of children getting the disease, for a while. But it s expected that a dengue vaccine would not provide total protection against infection.
However, it was a 2014 report, we are keeping our fingers crossed thinking that things will better now and the new experimental drug will be able to tide off these shortcomings. According to the media reports if things go as planned for the media giant then probably with the introduction of the vaccination dengue deaths can be controlled by 2019.
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