Starting in September, all babies in the UK will begin receiving vaccinations against meningitis B. That will make the UK the first country in the world to have a nationwide vaccine programme for the disease.
Meningitis B, caused by the "B" strain of the Neisseria meningitides bacterium, accounts for 60 to 80 per cent of all the UK's meningitis cases. On average there are 1200 cases of meningitis B each year in the UK, of which a tenth prove fatal. Another tenth result in serious impairments such as amputations, deafness, bone deformities and brain damage.
Vaccines are already available for other less common forms of the disease, such as meningitis C. "The meningitis C vaccine has been fantastic, and cases have dwindled away to just a handful since it was introduced in 1999," says Linda Glennie of the Meningitis Research Foundation charity in Bristol, UK, who hopes the same will now happen with meningitis B.
Undisclosed deal
Sold as Bexsero, the vaccine will be made available through a deal announced last week between the UK Department of Health and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. A company spokesman said that details will not be disclosed to avoid compromising potential deals with other countries.
GSK acquired the vaccine from its developer, Novartis, when it bought its vaccine research arm for $5.25 billion. In return, GSK sold its oncology assets to Novartis for $16 billion.
Bexsero was approved two months ago in the US for people aged between 10 and 25. It has previously been used following meningitis outbreaks at universities, including one at Princeton in 2013, during which 17,000 students received it.
Progress against meningitis is also accelerating in Africa, where meningitis A is the dominant form of the disease, affecting around 20 countries in a belt stretching from east to west across central Africa. Since 2010, 153 million Africans have received a vaccine against it called MenAfriVac.
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