HEALTH-CUBA: Fewer Needles, Same Protection from Disease

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Oct 2 2001 (IPS) - Cuban scientists are working to combine several vaccines in efforts to reduce the number of injections this Caribbean island’s infants receive as part of the national immunisation programme, which protects children from 13 diseases, including hepatitis B and meningitis types B and C.

Their efforts are part of projects – some on the verge of being introduced on the world market – conducted by the Finlay Institute, a vaccine research and production centre that also seeks to manufacture medications that Cuba currently must import.

“Combining vaccines is now a global trend. Here it is aimed at curbing the great number of injections children are receiving in their first year of life,” Franklin Sotolongo, head of applied scientific-technical assistance at the Finlay Institute.

Sotolongo pointed out that some inoculations are applied within relative short periods of each other, and could be combined if scientists find that they are not incompatible and that they do not interfere with each other from the epidemiological point of view.

“It is not necessarily a vaccine ‘cocktail,’ but we could combine four or more,” said Sotolongo, who was part of the research team that produced the only vaccine existing today against meningitis B, incorporated since 1991 in the Cuban Health Ministry’s immunisation programme.

In 1992, the programme added the hepatitis B vaccine to its line-up. It is produced by the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Centre (CIGB), leader of the more than 40 institutions that make up the so-called scientific and technological “pole” in western Havana.

Among the Finlay Institute’s priority projects is the combined vaccine for meningitis BC-hepatitis B and tetanus-diphtheria- pertussis (whooping cough), as well as an injection to protect against leptospirosis and salmonella B, which causes typhoid fever.

These two combined vaccines could be ready for public use next year, reports Sotolongo, adding that researchers are also working on an antidote for cholera, a disease that does not exist in Cuba but is a scourge in many countries of the developing South.

“The transnational pharmaceutical companies do not include it in their development efforts because it is not a disease that affects the industrialised North. Cuba can provide the world with this technology once it comes up with the final product,” said the scientist.

Sotolongo added that the Finlay Institute is at “a very advanced stage” in its project to create a vaccine against haemophilus influenza type B, another cause of meningitis. This would allow the government to save revenues currently spent on importing a similar vaccine.

With today’s vaccines, newborn Cubans are protected against meningitis B and C, hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, haemophilus influenza type B, parotitis, rubella, measles, typhoid fever and poliomyelitis.

Cuba’s health authorities say the broad-based vaccination plan has meant that polio has been eliminated here since 1962, neonatal tetanus and tuberculous meningitis in children under 12 months since 1972, and diphtheria since 1979.

Furthermore, as a result of the socialist government’s health campaign, congenital rubella syndrome and meningoencephalitis post- parotitis were wiped out in 1989.

Cuba spends 1.2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on its science and technology sector, and has 1.8 scientists and engineers for every 1,000 inhabitants.

At the CIGB laboratories, the scientists are trying to come up with a nasal application method for the hepatitis B vaccine, while continuing their search for an effective treatment for dengue and for HIV/AIDS.

“Our products play an important role in the health of the Cuban population (of more than 11 million), and many of the medications are exported,” said Pedro López Saura, CIGB director of regulations and clinical trials.

Both the hepatitis B and anti-meningitis BC (VA-MENGOC-BC) vaccines have proven effective in other countries of Latin America, and in Algeria and Tunisia.

VA-MENGOC-BC appears to be on the verge of winning a spot in the much-coveted European market, and later in the United States, once the paperwork involved in a Cuban agreement with the British- US firm SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals is concluded.

The transnational obtained authorisation in 1999 from Washington to sign an agreement with the Finlay Institute with the aim of marketing VA-MENGOC-BC in Europe.

The deal, though with certain conditions, has opened a small window in the US-imposed embargo that since the 1960s prevents any US-based company from doing business with the Cuban socialist regime.

“One of those conditions requires that half the profits from future sales of the vaccine must be paid in the form of food and medicine, not cash,” Sotolongo explained.

Another clause in the agreement establishes that the product must be applied in Europe before the United States will import it for use among its population.

Testing in Belgium during the next few months will be decisive for obtaining a patent on the vaccine sometime in 2002.

“We are planning a study in Spain that would allow us to complete the requirements for the vaccine to enter the European market,” said Sotolongo.