Ministry of Health volunteers may be first to test vaccine

By MONIQUE DEVEREUX

A never-before-tested vaccine to fight meningitis may be tried on Ministry of Health staff.

The Government yesterday announced it would spend $100 million over the next five years to fight the disease, which has killed 130 people in New Zealand since 1996, 26 people in the last year alone.

Californian company Chiron was contracted to develop the vaccine to combat New Zealand's specific strain of meningococcal B.

Clinical trials of the vaccine will begin in Auckland in May.

Healthy adult volunteers will be sought through public notices and advertisements but the ministry is unsure what level of support to expect from the public.

The vaccine will be injected and the volunteers monitored for some time afterwards.

They will be given a full medical examination before being accepted.

The Director of Public Health, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, could not disclose exact details of what the trials would involve because some things, including the number of injections each volunteer would receive, had yet to be worked out.

"I don't want to say too much because I don't want to frighten potential volunteers off. It will require us looking at them fairly closely," he said.

"It will involve time from people, however, and that's why we are looking at perhaps employees of the Ministry of Health.

"But then that's a question of if it is ethical, so basically we need to look at volunteers."

Dr Tukuitonga said the ministry did not know what the response was likely to be from the public.

"The issue, of course, is that no one in the rest of the world is going to do this for us, and I'm appealing to the good old Kiwi can-do attitude to come forward and say this is our opportunity to do this for ourselves."

He said it was unfortunate that meningitis was presented as a Maori and Pacific Island disease, when in fact over half of "absolute numbers" occur in European New Zealanders.

"So this is a problem for all of us."

Dr Tukuitonga said the trials would be extended to children aged between 8 and 10 later in the year and then onto toddlers.

If the trials are successful the vaccine will be used to immunise a million New Zealanders under the age of 20 within five years.

South Auckland has had the country's highest rates of meningitis in the past two years and 24 deaths since 1996. In the same time central Auckland has had 12 deaths.

Last year, 660 cases were reported.

It is hoped that with a vaccine, 3860 cases could be avoided within the 10 years after it is introduced.

Symptoms of meningitis include fever and vomiting and a rash that can look like blood spots under the skin.

nzherald.co.nz/health