At the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Director Anthony Fauci said a research group has progressed toward a vaccine that could be tested within a few months and begin its first clinical test by the end of the summer, according to a report in MedPage Today.

A clinical trial was launched in Brazil to test an experimental dengue vaccine on volunteers who were infected with the dengue virus.

It worked just as the researchers hoped.

"Knowing what we know about this new vaccine, we are confident that it is going to work", said lead author Anna Durbin, associate professor in International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

"TV003, a live attenuated dengue vaccine that induces antibodies to all four dengue virus serotypes, protected against infection of an attenuated virus in 21 recipients when compared with 20 non-vaccinated control", researchers wrote.

A AAAS general resource animation on mosquito-borne infections caused by the dengue virus. About 25,000 people a year - many of them children - develop dengue shock from blood loss and die.

"This is a tremendous step forward, and something that has been desperately needed for 30 years", says Duane Gubler, a disease researcher at the Duke NUS Medical School in Singapore who was not involved in the new study. So a vaccine has to protect against all four types. When they've developed one, they held a different testing method to ensure maximum efficiency. The only side effect associated with the vaccine was a rash around the injection site, which typically went away in five to 10 days. "And we have to be confident: Dengue is unique and if you don't do it right, you can do more harm than good". The results were originally published in Science Translational Medicine. Making a shot to tackle the outbreak isn't too hard in theory, but producing a safe, effective and deliverable product to protect pregnant women and girls is not easy in practice, experts say. "Zero percent of the vaccinated people had a rash", she said.

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He says that consumers - particularly middle- and high-income ones - increasingly " want to know what they're putting in their bodies".

Six months later, 41 people returned for the challenge with dengue virus.

Human trials are the most effective to test the efficacy of a vaccine but they're rarely conducted because of ethical concerns to the patient. It has been linked to brain defects in newborns, and also to the paralytic disease Guillain-Barre syndrome. Wednesday's dengue study offered more evidence that what sounds freaky not only can be done safely, it can offer important clues for how well a shot might work.

A human challenge model for Zika virus? This was so researchers could test it on people who would not have been previously exposed to any strain of the virus because ultimately, the vaccine will be used in areas where dengue circulates widely in young children who have not been previously exposed to dengue.

Scientists are really, really close to fighting a fair fight against dengue fever. Such "live" vaccines usually provide better and longer-lasting immune protection.

"The other difference is that you're following them over time to see when they might develop a clinical endpoint, which in this trial is dengue with any severity", she said. They can go to work. Valneva SE French biotech Biotech said in February it was evaluating the development of a Zika vaccine.

Removing the gene makes it less likely that the virus could somehow regain its ability to make people really sick - and it also prevents mosquitoes from picking up and transmitting the vaccine strain of the virus, Whitehead told reporters in a conference call.


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