Dysentery vaccine

1999/11/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Farmakologia

Shigella bacteria enter the intestine and cause dysentery. Cleaning is the best vaccine against the disease and treatment is antibiotic. For Third World countries, which suffer the most from dysentery, it is difficult the first and very expensive the second. However, researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have obtained the vaccine against the bacterium Shigellia flexeri. The gene that bacteria use to enter cells has been identified and transformed into the different specimens that form it.

In this way, bacteria cannot pass from cell to cell or survive. The vaccine has been tested in the United States with volunteers and no person has ever gotten the disease after the infection has been injected. Advantages of the vaccine: it is given in a single dose orally and costs less than half a dollar per unit. Testing is currently underway in infectious areas, but protection against the other two forms of Shigella remains to be discovered. The goal is to get a unique vaccine for all three bacteria.