U.S. cholera vaccine stockpile recommended

CHEVY CHASE, Md., Nov. 27 (UPI) -- The United States should stockpile cholera vaccines for deployment worldwide, U.S. and South Korean vaccine and infectious disease specialists say.

In an editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Matthew Waldor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Peter Hotez of George Washington University and the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and John Clemens of the International Vaccine Institute in South Korea say safe and reasonably effective vaccines are available but in short supply.

The risk of a cholera outbreak can rise rapidly in the wake of a man-made or natural disaster, such as in Haiti, when populations can be forced into overcrowded camps with poor sanitation.

A ready supply of vaccine could limit the impact of an outbreak dramatically, but there are fewer than 400,000 total doses of oral cholera vaccines available for shipment from their manufacturers, making it impossible to consider large-scale vaccination of at-risk populations with the recommended two- or three-dose regimens of either product, the experts say.

"The costs of maintaining a stockpile of several million doses of cholera vaccine in the United States would be low but the humanitarian and diplomatic benefits would be enormous," the authors say in the editorial.