A dengue vaccination trial conducted by France’s Sanofi Pasteur in five Asian countries, including Vietnam, showed the efficacy in 56.5 percent of dengue-infected cases.

The vaccination also prevented 67 percent of the sufferers from being hospitalized, heard a conference reviewing the efficacy of the vaccination in the community in Ho Chi Minh City on November 3.

The trial was undertaken on 10,275 children and teenagers aged 2 to 14 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

In Vietnam, from September 2011, 2,336 children in the two Mekong Delta provinces of An Giang and Tien Giang got vaccinated.

At the conference, director of the Health Ministry’s Preventive Medicine Department Tran Dac Phu noted that a lack of dengue vaccine is a huge burden on not only Vietnam but many other countries.

The dengue vaccine research programme has been conducted by Sanofi Pasteur over the past 20 years, with the participation of Ho Chi Minh City’s Pasteur Institute. It will be implemented until November 2017.

According to the World Health Organisation, each year, an estimated 50 million people contract dengue, of whom 500,000 require hospitalization and 25,000 die.

Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi, provides more than one billion doses of vaccine each year, making it possible to immunize more than 500 million people across the globe.

A world leader in the vaccine industry, Sanofi Pasteur offers the broadest range of vaccines protecting against 20 infectious diseases.-VNA