Group to Store Yellow Fever Vaccine

DAKAR, Senegal- Concerned about possible shortages of yellow fever vaccine, a U.N.-backed immunization alliance said Thursday it will begin stockpiling doses for rapid deployment to stricken areas.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, or GAVI, has earmarked $3 million a year for at least the next two years to build up a store of millions of doses. If necessary, the project will be extended for a third year, GAVI officials said.

"Yellow fever is a disease we had conquered 40 years ago, but is now coming back due to a lack of commitment - both politically and medically" to keeping it down, said Jacques-Francois Martin, who heads the fund linked to GAVI that will provide the money for the vaccine. The alliance includes the World Health Organization, World Bank, U.N. Children's Fund and more than 50 companies, governments and aid organizations.

Yellow Fever - so named because some patients get jaundice - is endemic in 33 African countries and 11 in South America. It strikes an estimated 200,000 people a year and kills 30,000 of them, according to WHO figures. The symptoms include fever, vomiting, muscle pain and kidney failure.

The stockpile of vaccine will be used to stem the spread of outbreaks, creating an emergency buffer zone of immunized people to contain the disease until it burns itself out. It will also be used for preventive campaigns in the worst-hit areas across west and central Africa, officials said.

A highly effective yellow fever vaccine was created some 60 years ago and was widely distributed until the 1960s, nearly eradicating the mosquito-transmitted disease from the jungles where it thrived.

But as the disease waned, many governments relaxed their campaigns and the medical community focused on more dramatic but less prevalent diseases, like Ebola, Martin said.

Attention and resources strayed and many infants went unnecessarily uninoculated. Now there is an unprotected adult population, too.

As demand fell, manufacturers turned their attention to newer and more profitable vaccines used in more than just a few impoverished regions. There are now just three companies approved by WHO to manufacture yellow fever vaccine.

At the end of 2000, a yellow-fever outbreak in Guinea left medical workers scrambling to borrow enough vaccine from other countries because manufactures had none left to sell.

The following year, at least 20 suspected cases of yellow fever - including four deaths - were reported in Abidjan, the commercial capital of west Africa's economic powerhouse, Ivory Coast. Millions of doses were rushed in to provide immunity for the healthy.

Now Senegal, where about 400 delegates from GAVI members are attending a three-day meeting, is in the grip of an outbreak. Since early September, 57 cases have been documented, including 10 deaths, according to WHO. More than 1.4 million emergency doses have been administered.

Flare-ups like these - almost unheard of two decades ago - are seriously depleting stores and UNICEF has expressed concern about possible shortages next year.

Carol Bellamy, the head of UNICEF, said the new fund should help curb the scourge.

"We have already been covering the children, but now we'll be able treat older people, and invest more money" in battling yellow fever, she said after touring Dakar's Institut Pasteur, Africa's only manufacturer of the vaccine.

The announcement should also provide incentive to manufacturers to boost production, she said.

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