The Epidemic Dengvaxia in the Philippines Research Paper

Introduction

Dengvaxia is the first licensed vaccine used to protect against dengue fever. This disease is caused by viruses, which are vectored by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Symptoms of this disease include joint pain, rash, sore throat, headache, and nausea. The virus strains responsible for the fever are DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3, and DENV-4 (Larson et al., 2019). Regions that have multiple strains of this virus have been classified as hyper-endemic. The Philippines was identified as an endemic region by the World Health Organization (Sauer et al., 2017). The efficacy of the Dengvaxia vaccine against Dengue fever in the Philippines was investigated in this study.

Methodology

One million children aged between 9–10 years were injected with Dengvaxia in 2016. Vaccination was facilitated by the Philippine Dengvaxia program. Data on whether the children being vaccinated had previously survived from dengue virus infection was recorded. Thereafter, the number of children who reported ill after receiving the vaccine was recorded within a period of two years. The severity of the disease for each patient with dengue fever was also noted during hospital visits.

Findings and Discussion

In 2017, there was a high risk of severe dengue fever and hospitalization among the children who had been vaccinated. All the people who were negative for the virus at the time of injection became positive. Approximately 371717 cases of the disease and 1407 deaths were reported in November 2019. There was a major outbreak of dengue disease in 2018 and 2019 in the Philippines (Sauer et al., 2017). The finding showed that Dengvaxia caused the massive spread of the virus. The most affected persons were children aged 5–9 years (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2019). As a result, parents perceived that the vaccine caused more infection rather than cure.

Conclusion

The efficacy of the Dengvaxia vaccine against the Dengue virus was disputed and the Philippines Dengvaxia program was suspended (Larson et al., 2019). Although death incidence averted by the vaccine was more than Dengvaxia-induced cases, the severe pandemic in the region was attributed to it (Flasche et al., 2019). For this reason, the spread of dengue disease was termed epidemic Dengavaxia in the Philippines.

References

1. Flasche, S., Wilder-Smith, A., Hombach, J., & Smith, P. (2019). Estimating the proportion of vaccine-induced hospitalized dengue cases among Dengvaxia vaccinees in the Philippines. Wellcome Open Research, 4, 165.
2. Larson, H. J., Hartigan-Go, K., & Figueiredo, A. (2019). Vaccine confidence plummets in the Philippines following dengue vaccine scare: Why it matters to pandemic preparedness. Human vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 15(3), 625-627.
3. Sauer, J., Fanous, J., Anchuri, K., Lahlou, H., Legrand, A., Labasi-sammartino, C., & He, S. (2017). DENGVAXIA®. The Prognosis McGill’s Student Global Heath Journal, 30.
4. The Lancet Infectious Diseases. (2019). Infectious disease crisis in the Philippines. The Lancet. Infectious diseases, 19(12), 1265. Web.