Cholera Vaccine

A cholera vaccine is a vaccine effective at reducing the risk of contracting cholera, with the recommended vaccines administered orally to elicit local immune responses in the gut against Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium responsible for the illness. The first effective oral cholera vaccine, Dukoral, was developed in Sweden in the 1980s and provides about 85 percent protection for the first six months, decreasing to roughly 60 percent over the first two years, with herd immunity increasing overall protective impact to more than 90 percent when enough of a population is immunized. The World Health Organization recommends three oral cholera vaccines, Dukoral, Shanchol and Euvichol-Plus, in combination with other measures for those at high risk. The first cholera vaccines were developed in the late nineteenth century but were largely abandoned in the 1970s due to documented reactogenicity and poor efficacy before oral cholera vaccines were reintroduced in the 1990s; it is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.