Shots - Health Blog Tue September 4, 2012 Zanzibar Shows Cholera
Vaccine Can Protect Even The Unvaccinated Originally published
on Wed September 5, 2012 2:09 pm Cholera vaccine gives indirect
protection to unvaccinated people in communities where a
substantial fraction of the population gets the vaccine, a study
in Africa shows. The effect is called "herd immunity." It works
because there are fewer bacteria circulating in communities
where vaccination levels are relatively high. The result comes
from Zanzibar, an island state of Tanzania, where half the
people in six rural and urban areas received two doses of oral
cholera vaccine. For those who got it, the vaccine was 79
percent protective against the disease. But their neighbors who
didn't get vaccinated had almost as much protection. "This
finding is good news for policymakers who have to deal with
cholera in settings where...safe water supply and adequate
sanitation cannot be established in a reasonable time frame,"
the study authors write in The Lancet I