Indian government has announced that they are developing a new low-cost vaccine to treat diarrhea, one of the major causes of childhood deaths across developing countries.
The Indian manufacturer of the new rotavirus vaccine said they will price each vaccine for $1, which is comparatively much lesser than the other vaccines available in the market.
Around half a million children across the world and 100,000 kids in India die due to diarrhea every year. At a conference Tuesday, the government announced that Phase III trials of Rotavac proved that it was safe as well as effective.
The researchers did a clinical trial on 6,799 infants at three sites in India. It showed a significant reduction in diarrhea cases. The severe cases of diarrhea caused by rotavirus reduced by 56 percent during the first year of life.
"The clinical results indicate that the vaccine, if licensed, could save the lives of thousands of children each year in India," said Dr. K Vijay Raghavan, the secretary of the Department of Biotechnology.
The vaccine is yet to be licensed before distribution in India and requires approval of the World Health Organization before its global distribution.
After pneumonia, diarrhea is the second leading cause of death among children in the developing countries. A study of 22,568 children at sites in seven African and south Asian countries found that rotavirus was the major cause of moderate to severe diarrhea in children under the age of two.
A weakened strain of the virus form a child hospitalized in New Delhi was used to make the vaccine more than a quarter century ago. Fox News reported that it was the result of a broad global partnership that included the government, the Indian company Bharat Biotech, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among many others.
"This public-private partnership is an exemplary model of how to develop affordable technologies to save lives," Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, said in a statement.
