New vaccine for cholera works faster than the disease spreads

Value-based healthcare system closely looks at the health challenges of patients and tries to cure them because it’s a delivery model in which providers are paid for helping patients to improve their health and live healthily. One such endeavor to improve patient health was made by researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston.                           

They unexpectedly developed a vaccine for cholera that works faster than cholera spreads. The study was published in Science Translational Medicine where the researchers mentioned that they used a highly virulent cholera strain, which was obtained from the Haiti outbreak to make the live vaccine and they named it HaitiV.

When the researchers tested it on animals they found that the vaccine was quick enough to colonize in the small intestine. Infact, it was quicker than the original cholera pathogen thus, it served as a near-immediate probiotic against the virus.

Robert Hall Ph.D., a microbiologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, believes that this vaccine can reduce the requirement for antibiotic treatment. This lowers the risk of causing an increased antibiotic resistance in cholera.

This study will lead to other ways of treating bacterial diseases such as Escherichia coli and Clostridium difficle without antibiotics.