/REPEAT//HEALTH-CUBA: Meningitis Vaccine Breaks into Global Market

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Aug 18 1998 (IPS) - Cuba has broken into the highly concentrated global pharmaceutical market with 40 million doses of meningitis vaccine sold to 12 countries so far.

And the vaccine – considered the world’s only effective vaccine against meningococcus group B – could become the first Cuban- produced medicine to penetrate the U.S. market.

Some 120 companies account for 90 percent of the 200 billion dollars moved annually by the global pharmaceutical industry.

“Brazil has been the main consumer of this product, administered in 15 large-scale immunisation campaigns in 12” of Brazil’s 26 states, medical doctor Franklin Sotolongo, director of applied scientific-technical assistance in the Carlos J. Finlay Institute, which specialises in vaccines, said Monday.

Sotolongo said studies of effectiveness of the Cuban vaccine came up with “positive results” in Brazil and Colombia.

Meningococcal meningitis is no longer a health problem in Cuba, where some eight million doses of vaccine have been injected, mainly to infants and children over the age of three and a half months, in the past 10 years.

In May, the British company Smithkline Beecham Pharmaceuticals asked the U.S. government for authorisation to test the Cuban vaccine in the laboratories of its U.S. subsidiary, which would entail the payment of millions of dollars to Cuba.

Smithkline Beecham Pharmaceuticals spokesman Richard Koening said that in the company’s view, “the vaccine is in need of further development and work, but it is the most advanced vaccine that exists, and in our opinion offers the best opportunity for combating the illness in the medium-term.

“If an effective vaccine comes out of this within a few years, we hope it will be used to protect U.S. citizens themselves,” Koening told reporters in the United States.

An annual average of 1,000 people contract meningitis B in the United States, 120 of whom die, according to Dr. Nancy Rosenstein, an expert on meningitis with the Atlanta-based U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The British firm sees the challenge as a political rather than scientific one, and says its success will depend on its ability to get around the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba in order to work with the government of Fidel Castro.

Cuba’s socialist government opted early this decade for giving high priority to research and development in the field of biotechnology and the medical-pharmaceutical industry as a potential source of revenues for an economy steeped in crisis since 1990.

In 1991 and 1992, exports of biotech and pharmaceutical products brought state coffers around 200 million dollars – a figure considered low, nevertheless, compared to the amount invested and the significance and exclusiveness of several of the results.

Cuba’s anti-meningitis vaccine, awarded a gold medal by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, was developed in 1985 from the culture of live microorganisms by a team headed by physicians Concepcion Campa and Gustavo Sierra.

The search for a vaccine became particularly urgent when meningitis B reached epidemic levels in Cuba, peaking at 14.4 cases per 10,000 inhabitants in 1983.

According to the Pan-American Health Organisation, field tests carried out in 1987 among 106,000 Cubans aged 10 to 16 resulted in 83 percent effectiveness of the vaccine.

According to epidemiologist Victoria Casanueva with the Carlos J. Finlay Institute, the incidence of meningitis B has been reduced thirtyfold, to levels lower than those seen prior to the epidemic, since the vaccine began to be used in Cuba.

The Public Health Ministry’s office on statistics indicates that less than one case of meningitis per 100,000 inhabitants has been reported since 1991 in Cuba, a country of 11 million.

Besides the VA-MENGOC-BC vaccine, the Carlos J. Finlay Institute is currently testing its VAX-SPIRAL vaccine against leptospirosis in humans on high risk groups, and has applied its VAX-TET tetanus toxoid since 1996.

A multi-discipline team of scientists is presently working in Cuba to find a vaccine against AIDS, and efforts are being made to develop a trivalent diptheria-tetanus-whooping cough (DTP) vaccine and combined DTP-hepatitis B vaccine.

‘Workers’, the weekly publication of Cuba’s central union, pointed out Monday that “the immense majority of vaccines included in the immunisation programme (against 12 infectious diseases) are produced locally.”