CONAKRY, Guinea — The health workers rode on canoes and rickety boats to deliver cholera vaccines to remote islands in Guinea. Months later, the country has recorded only one confirmed cholera case this year, down from thousands.
The rare success, overshadowed by the Ebola outbreak that has ravaged Guinea and two other West African countries, is being cautiously attributed to the vaccinations and to hand-washing in the campaign against Ebola.
Helen Matzger of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said Guinea’s experience is encouraging other countries to accept the cholera vaccine and has led the GAVI Alliance — which works to deliver vaccines to the world’s poor — to invest in a global stockpile and the U.N. World Health Organization to increase that stockpile to about 2 million doses.
Matzger, the foundation’s senior program officer for vaccine delivery, said she was amazed at the ease and efficiency with which the vaccine was delivered to very remote islands.
She said she was on a wobbly boat that made the first delivery, along with Dr. Sakoba Keita, a Cuban-trained Guinean physician who was responsible for Guinea’s epidemics surveillance before being appointed the West African nation’s Ebola czar.
“In many instances in global health, you see one brave individual who is willing to do something that’s different because they think it will have an impact, and Dr. Sakoba was that person,” Matzger said in a telephone interview from her Seattle office.
In March, the World Health Organization, with support from UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, vaccinated about 200,000 fishermen on islands north of Conakry, the capital, where they gather from Guinea and neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia during the fishing season, said Julien Labas, in charge of UNICEF’s campaign for clean water, sanitation and hygiene. The area had been identified as a major transmission source for cholera.
The cholera outbreak in 2012 sickened 7,350 people and killed 133 of them in Guinea. WHO estimates there are 3 million to 5 million cholera cases a year worldwide, and 100,000 to 120,000 deaths.
