Jan. 26, 2010 Research from Malawi, Birmingham and Liverpool has
renewed hope that an effective vaccine could be developed
against nontyphoidal strains of Salmonella. The work, funded by
the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline, suggests that the body's
immune system could be primed to tackle even the most resilient
of strains. In developed countries, nontyphoidal Salmonella
(NTS) strains are mainly food-borne and usually cause
gastroenteritis. In rare cases, they can lead to bacteraemia
(bacterial infections of the blood). However, in the developing
world, bacteraemia is far more common and serious: fatality
rates can be as high as almost one in four among children under
two years old and HIV-infected adults. In previous research led
by Dr Calman MacLennan, scientists based at the Malawi-
Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW) in
Blantyre, Malawi , showed that disease-causing strains of NTS
were able to survive outside cells in the blood of children.
This survival mechanism enables the bacte