Why isn't a EEE vaccine available to the general public?
BOSTON - Eastern equine encephalitis, better known as EEE, is a rare, but serious disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes that can cause brain damage and death.
In late August, a healthy 41-year-old man in New Hampshire died after contracting EEE.
EEE vaccine for humans
It might surprise you to learn there is an effective vaccine out there for EEE, but it's only approved for horses. Scientists at the National Institute of Health developed a human EEE vaccine that was found to be safe, but it's reserved for laboratory workers and the military.
So why isn't there a EEE vaccine for the general public?
According to Sam Telford, the Director of Tufts University's New England Biosafety Lab, it comes down to money.
"It's too expensive to do the research and development and the clinical trial process to accumulate the data required by (the) FDA," he told WBZ-TV.
The Food and Drug Administration makes sure our vaccines and medications are safe and effective, and the process is complex and expensive for that reason.
As a graduate student working on EEE in a lab, Telford took the human vaccine himself but that's harder to do now.
"You have to have them travel to Fort Detrick, Maryland and be examined there and given the vaccine there," he said.
Advances in vaccine production
Professor Telford believes the explosion of scientific innovation unleashed during the COVID pandemic is going to open up all kinds of avenues for experiments and vaccine production.
One possible solution to work around the expense of development could be wrapping the human EEE vaccine in with a West Nile Virus or Lyme Disease vaccine.
"This would be one way to avoid this return on investment problem, is to just fold in a rare disease target along with something that's much more economically viable," Telford said.
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