Brazil Receives 750,000 Doses of Dengue Vaccine from Japanese Laboratory Takeda Pharma

On Saturday, Brazil received a batch of 750,000 doses of the Qdenga vaccine against dengue donated by the Japanese laboratory Takeda Pharma and that will allow it to anticipate its immunization campaign in the midst of one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in recent years, sources reported. officers.

The Japanese laboratory intends to deliver a second batch of 570,000 vaccines also donated in February, before beginning to ship that same month the 5.2 million doses of the immunizer purchased by the Brazilian Government to be applied in 2024, according to the Ministry of Health.

The Latin American giant was one of the first countries to include the dengue vaccine in its free public vaccination campaign and will begin distributing it for the first time this year.

READ ALSO: WHO says that dengue cases have multiplied by 10 times in the world

The expectation is that Brazil will be able to immunize 3.2 million of its inhabitants in 2024, since the treatment consists of two doses applied at an interval of three months, in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in the regions of the country that have suffered the most. with dengue in the last ten years.

The priority will be to immunize adolescents between 10 and 14 years old, as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), since it is the population that concentrates the highest number of hospitalizations due to dengue in Brazil.

Takeda has a deadline to deliver the vaccines until November, but decided to donate a significant shipment and anticipate deliveries due to the Government’s need to anticipate the immunization campaign to combat the current outbreak of the disease.

“We will be able to start vaccination at the beginning of February,” said Health Minister Nísia Trindade in a video that the Ministry of Health published on its social networks.

Brazil registered 55,800 cases of dengue in the first two weeks of 2024, a record for the period and more than double that recorded in the same period last year. In the first 14 days of the year, six deaths were recorded from the disease.

According to the Ministry of Health, the country had already registered 1.6 million cases of dengue last year, a number 15.8% higher than in 2022, and a record of 1,094 deaths from the disease.

Brazilian authorities predict that the numbers will continue to rise in 2024 due to the El Niño meteorological phenomenon, which causes more heat and humidity in most of the Brazilian territory, conditions that favor the proliferation of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector that transmits dengue.

The Qdenga vaccine, with two doses, was developed to prevent the spread of the four different serotypes of the virus and has an overall effectiveness of 80.2%.

READ ALSO: Mosquitoes: from enemies to allies against dengue

2024-01-22 07:45:00
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