A Rapporteur's Summary : Research on Dengue Vaccine
摘要
Dengue virus is a member of flavivirus group. Diseases caused by flaviviruses have been a scourge of mankind for long history of human kind; with yellow fever at the top, followed by dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis (JE) and Russian spring-summer encephalitis (RSSE). Due to the dvevelopment of a safe and efficacious live-attenuated vaccine against yellow fever as a first laboratory-designed virus vaccine, this disease is no longer a threat in countries where adequate vaccination is practiced. Similarly, safe and efficacious inactivated vaccines against JE and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) have also been developed, resulting in dramatical reduction in the disease incidences. In spite of these successes, the development of vaccines against other pathogenic flaviviruses, such as dengue fever and RSSE have not been successful. Control of dengue virus became rather urgent because of the emergence of new syndrome, dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), which causes high mortality among infants. The present review attempts to summarize the characteristics of dengue fever and DHF, common features of flavivirus infections as the basis vaccine development and recent advances and problems encountered in dengue vaccine research.