Cholera vaccine plan splits experts

摘要

Rarely heard in Haiti before October, 'cholera is now an insult that children fling at one another in the teeming camps that still house more than a million people displaced by last January's devastating earthquake. Graffiti blames the disease on either the current administration-now in a contested election crisis-or the United Nations. The disease is as much a fixture in people's lives as the endless piles of rubble that remain uncleared a year after the quake.Last week, as the country remembered the 230,000 people killed in the disaster, officials of international health agencies fine-tuned their recommendations for moving forwards with a large-scale cholera-vaccination programme. It is a controversial idea that, just months ago, with little vaccine available and the epidemic spreading rapidly, was shunned as impractical and probably ineffectual (see Nature 468, 483-484; 2010).