U.S. scientist vows to find vaccine for rotavirus

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, OCT. 12. At least 2,000 children die across the globe daily of rotaviral diarrhoea. In India alone, it takes a toll of 1.50 lakh children in the 0-5 years age group. In fact, all Indian children, irrespective of social and economic strata are infected with rotavirus during the first few years. And yet, quite shockingly, there is no vaccine for this infection in India in an era when scientists have scaled new heights by mapping the entire human genome.

Vaccines have been developed by some MNCs in the U.S., Belgium and China, but they are useless to combat virus strains native to India. An Indo-U.S. collaborative venture was launched in the Eighties to find a vaccine with funds from the National Institutes of Health, U.S., and the Indian Government's Department of Bio-technology.

Dr. Roger I. Glass, Chief, Viral Vaccines, of the U.S. Government's Centre for Disease Control (CDC), Atlanta, which employees 6,000 people, has been associated with this project since inception. Having worked on an anti-cholera project in Bangladesh during 1979-82, his life's mission now is to find a vaccine for the bug. His passion is evident when he goes round asking everyone at a meeting whether they have heard of rotavirus. ``I want every mother to know this name and realise that it is vaccine-preventive,'' he says.

Speaking to The Hindu during his recent visit to the City, the scientist explains why scientists could not discover the vaccine for the deadly bug. Discovered by an Australian scientist, Ms. Ruth Fischer, in 1973, rotavirus is named thus because it has an unique shape resembling a wheel. This discovery fuelled research on the epidemiology of rotavirus, the commonest cause of diarrhoea.

But, the rotavirus could not be grown in the laboratory, a vital step to discover steps to prevent the disease. It took eight years of hard research to grow the virus and begin vaccine trials. However, drug companies in the U.S. were not enthusiastic about funding research on the vaccine because rotavirus was not a major killer in that country. In India, children belonging to the lower economic strata may suffer as many as 25 episodes of rotaviral diarrhoea compared to only 5 in the U.S. Research began in full earnest about 12 years ago in the multi-institution collaboration between India and the US.

The first breakthrough came when scientists in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and AIIMS, New Delhi, discovered that rotavirus strains caused infection in new borns but not the disease as such. Its most important feature was that the first attack of diarrhoea was most severe, and sometimes fatal, and the subsequent ones are mild. This was because the virus was protecting the infant against subsequent disease, a fact that took the scientists a couple of years to figure out and find a vaccine.

Dr. Glass said it might take five years to complete clinical trials on the vaccine and introduce it into the market. He pointed out that isolation of the virus was half the job done and recalled that the Nobel prize was given for discovery of the polio virus and not for finding the vaccine though it has saved millions of children world-wide from the crippling disease.

He praised India's pulso polio programme considering the gigantic task involved in giving simultaneous vaccine in spite of the fact that polio has not been totally eradicated. Vaccine for rotaviral diarrhoea might not be expensive, he said, adding a day was not far off when it is administered to all Indian children like the polio vaccine.

Dr. Glass feels that the Indian and U.S. scientists deserved the Nobel Prize once the vaccine passed clinical trials considering that one out of 20 infant deaths in India are due to rotavirus. Taking a dim view of assertions that cholera had been eliminated from India, he pointed out that Bangladesh and Vietnam were also making such baseless claims.

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