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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – A new cholera vaccine starts protecting against the deadly disease within a day, experiments in rabbits suggest. The rapid protection offered by this designer vaccine may one day limit the spread of cholera outbreaks, says HHMI Investigator Matthew Waldor. Waldor and his colleagues discovered that the vaccine, called HaitiV, protects rabbits from cholera-causing bacteria almost immediately – even before an immune response begins. That effect suggests the vaccine will be particularly good at curbing fast-spreading cholera, which causes between 21,000 and 143,000 deaths worldwide each year. After tracing the genetic origins of the V. cholerae strain responsible for the 2010 outbreak in Haiti, Waldor and his colleagues realized that the bacteria had changed in the decades since existing cholera vaccines were designed. “The last vaccines were made a long time ago, and they don’t incorporate a lot of our modern understanding of this pathogen,” Waldor says. |
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