May God Have Mercy On Those Guinea Pigs " Monkey Labs"

Jean Pierre Alexandre - April 12 2012, 11:28 AM

"Jean Pierre Alexandre says: Monkey labs because that vaccine is in experiment or trial.

Why they did not used it on the senators and Martelly first before administrate that vaccine on the population, beside they are the head of state."

THE NEWS

Previous Vaccination Against Cholera Finally Begins In Haiti

After myriad delays and setback, health workers in Haiti are beginning to vaccinate against cholera.

Today, 50,000 people living in the slums of Port-au-Prince will start to get immunized against the disease.

This weekend, another 50,000 villagers in the low rice-growing areas of the Artibonite River valley will get their first doses of an oral cholera vaccine.

It's a pilot project that will involve only 1 percent of Haiti's population.

The aim is to show that it's possible to give the required two doses over a two-week period to desperately poor and hard-to-reach people.

If it works, the plan is to convince the Haitian government, deep-pocketed donors and international health agencies to support a much bigger campaign to vaccinate millions of Haitians at highest risk of cholera.

Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, which is organizing the rural arm of the project, says he's already working on that more ambitious goal. "What I would hope for Haiti and for the Congo and other places with cholera," Farmer told Shots, "is that it's just a matter of political will and investment to ramp up vaccine production and build a global stockpile."

The Indian producer of Shanchol, the vaccine being used in Haiti, makes it only when agencies put in orders.

So the pilot project in Haiti, which is using 200,000 doses at a cost
of around $400,000, is using up almost all the current world supply of the vaccine.

Dr. Jean William Pape, who heads a Haitian group called GHESKIO that's doing the Port-au-Prince part of the current campaign, thinks vaccine could blunt the impact of cholera in Haiti in the near term.

Thousands of doses of cholera vaccine sit in a refrigerated trailer in a United Nations compound in Saint-Marc, Haiti.

"If we give this vaccine every three years to the at-risk population, we will see that the curve of those who are infected with cholera will decrease year after year," Pape told NPR. "I think that's what we should aim for."

It's been a long and twisted path toward what vaccination proponents consider an obvious response to one of the biggest cholera epidemics on record.

Over the past 18 months, 530,000 Haitians have suffered from the fast-moving disease.

Tens of thousands have been hospitalized.

More than 7,000 have died.

Not until this week did cholera vaccination get the green light from Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population, after weeks of internal wrangling over the ethics of the project.

The health minister, Dr. Florence Duperval Guillaume, approved the project last December.

The previous Haitian government opposed cholera vaccination.

Insiders say that's largely because influential agencies such as the Pan American Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signaled their opposition.

"The general culture around cholera vaccination in public health agencies has been that it's not a good idea. It's too complicated.

It's too hard. It's costly," says Dr. Louise Ivers of Partners in Health.

"That the Haitians can't even get measles coverage to be high enough.

There's a kind of apathy about introducing another vaccine into such a place.

"Then there's the philosophical notion

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