Modern History of Cholera Vaccines and the Pivotal Role of icddr,b
Jan Holmgren
Abstract
The rapid spread of the seventh cholera pandemic over Asia in the 1960s led to several large field studies that revealed that the traditional injectable cholera vaccines had poor efficacy, which led the World Health Organization (WHO) in the 1970s to stop recommending cholera vaccination. At the same time, it stimulated research that has led to the development of the effective orally administered cholera vaccines (OCVs) that today are a cornerstone in WHO's strategy for Ending Cholera-A Global Roadmap to 2030. The first effective OCV, Dukoral, containing a mixture of inactivated Vibrio cholerae bacteria and cholera toxin B subunit, was licensed in 1991 and is, together with 2 similar inactivated whole-cell OCVs, Shanchol and Euvichol, currently WHO prequalified and recommended OCVs. This brief review is a personal account of the modern history of the development of these now universally recognized effective tools.