After more than 100 years of silence, cholera returned to Haiti with a vengeance last year, infecting more than 230,000 people and claiming 4,500 lives.
Although cholera has long plagued mankind, we have a tool today that wasn’t available to the people living on the banks of the Magdalena River in Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novel: a vaccine.
So, why did so many die of cholera 20 years after the initial approval of a cholera vaccine? The answer (or at least part of it): the cholera vaccine was not deployed during the 2010 outbreak. Although the decision not to use the cholera vaccine in Haiti was complex, the challenges faced by the cholera vaccine have implications for other vaccines that are available today and for new vaccines for neglected disease that are still in development.