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Health and medicine

Studies: Two new vaccines can protect against rotavirus

TRENTON, N.J. - Two new vaccines appear safe and effective against rotavirus, a major diarrheal killer of young children in poor countries, two new studies show.

The results prompted two government doctors to call for making immunization "a global priority."

Rotavirus, which causes diarrhea and dehydration, leads to more than 2-million hospitalizations and half a million deaths a year, mostly in developing countries. In the United States, the virus sickens about 2.7-million children younger than 5, sends as many as 70,000 to the hospital and causes 20 to 70 deaths each year.

In 1999, a different rotavirus vaccine, made by Wyeth, was pulled from the U.S. market after it was linked to an increase in intussusception, a rare, life-threatening blockage or twisting of the intestine.

The new vaccines, developed by the drugmakers that ran the studies, Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, did not increase cases of the disorder. The studies, each including about 60,000 children, are reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

The two studies found each vaccine prevented at least 98 percent of severe cases of gastroenteritis, or intestinal inflammation.

"It's a huge advance," said Dr. Peter Wenger, associate professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark. He was not involved in the research.

He said nearly all U.S. children get rotavirus at some point. In developing countries, where many children are malnourished and have other infections, "this pushes them over the edge."

Drs. Roger I. Glass and Umesh D. Parashar of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in an editorial that the new vaccines are impressive enough that routine immunizations should be done worldwide.

Merck's RotaTeq, a genetically engineered, three-dose oral vaccine, protects against five common rotavirus strains. The company's study, on infants 6 to 12 weeks old in the U.S., Taiwan and nine countries in Europe and Central America, found RotaTeq prevented 74 percent of all gastroenteritis caused by rotavirus, cut hospitalizations by 95 percent and spared parents lost time from work.

GlaxoSmithKline's Rotarix, a two-dose oral vaccine, was studied in infants 6 weeks and older in Finland and 11 Latin America countries. It protected them against 85 percent of serious gastroenteritis from rotavirus, reducing hospitalizations by 42 percent.

[Last modified January 5, 2006, 01:19:08]