Upstate Medical University is working together with the military to come up with a vaccine to prevent dengue fever.
The medical research wing of the Army is willing to spend up to $12 million over the next three-and-a-half years, as Upstate researchers try to develop a vaccine for a disease that affects half the world’s population.
Mark Polhemus of Upstate says while most people associate dengue with third world countries, the mosquito borne illness has a foothold in the U.S.
"It’s creeping out of the countries that we used to call over there, right in to the United States. So now it's in Florida, in Texas, In Hawaii, right here in the United States. It’s in the same family as West Nile. It’s carried by a mosquito, like West Nile. And we know the West Nile story. It started in one portion of the United States and swept throughout the country,” said Polhemus.
Right now, there are no vaccines or antiviral therapies for victims of dengue. The severity of the disease ranges from mild flu-like symptoms to life threatening hemorrhagic fever. The military’s interest in this is keeping troops safe who are deployed in regions where the virus is common. Researchers will inject volunteers with an experimental vaccine, and then study its reaction to different strains of dengue in a medically supervised setting.
