“Argentina Reports Three Candidate Vaccines for Dengue Prevention Amid Epidemic Outbreak”

Dengue is advancing in Argentina with the characteristics of an epidemic, and has already caused several deaths. In this disturbing context, the Ministry of Health reported that there are three “candidate” vaccines for its prevention: one in development, another approved for those who have already had the disease, and the third under evaluation by the National Administration of Medicines. Food and Medical Technology (Anmat).

From the health portfolio they warned that although “it is good news”, these are not tools to “control the current outbreak”, for which they called to continue working on the elimination of mosquito breeding sites and on identifying warning signs .

“There are three vaccines. One is already registered in Argentina, it is a vaccine that is used for people who have already had dengue, you have to do a prior test and it is registered here but it is not available in the private sector due to a precisely private decision,” said the Minister of Health, Carla Vizzotti.

The official specified that “there is a vaccine from Brazil, from the Butantán Institute, which is under development, and there is a third vaccine, from the Japanese laboratory Takeda, which is in the last phase of evaluation by Anmat. Surely in these days we will have news of that evaluation. It is important not to generate expectations that tomorrow there will be a vaccine that will solve everything.

The infectious disease doctor Tomás Orduna, former head of the Tropical Medicine and Travel Medicine Service at the FJ Muñiz Infectious Hospital, warned that “vaccines, by themselves, are not going to be a magic solution that will cause the fall of what implicates dengue as a mosquito-borne disease worldwide.”