New meningitis threat being contained by web of partnerships.

2004 MAY 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- A rare strain of meningitis, which re-emerged recently in Burkina Faso, would have left health authorities helpless just 2 years ago. Now, thanks to 2 years of work orchestrated by the World Health Organization (WHO), the strain (known as W135) has been rapidly identified and a mass-action campaign is now controlling the outbreak.

"At last, we have the tools to contain small outbreaks like this one before they cripple an entire region," said Dr. Michael J. Ryan, coordinator of WHO's Global Alert and Response unit.

Meningitis sweeps across sub-Saharan Africa every year, sometimes triggering outbreaks involving 100,000 people or more. But mass-response plans had been successful in limiting the outbreaks until 2 years ago when W135 emerged in Africa. Laboratories were hard-pressed to identify the new disease, field epidemiologists had no experience tracking it, and no affordable vaccine existed to protect people from it. Because of these deficiencies, the 2002 outbreak in Burkina Faso resulted in 13,000 people becoming infected with W135; 1500 of them died before the outbreak burned itself out.

Following that event, WHO began work organizing partnerships to build a "mass intervention delivery system" in the region that would combat W135. Laboratory workers and ...