Active Infection & Immunity Pregnancy, Children & Inherited Conditions

Real-world Effectiveness of Oral Cholera Vaccines in Preventing Cholera in Mozambique - REOP

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Cambridge
Funding £1.0M
Period Feb 2025 — Feb 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Cholera outbreaks in Mozambique are hitting communities that lack reliable data on whether the oral vaccines being deployed actually stop the disease in real-world conditions. The problem is that while safe and effective oral cholera vaccines exist, national health officials have been slow to adopt them because they lack hard evidence of how well the vaccines work outside controlled clinical trials. This project will track three planned vaccination campaigns from 2024 to 2025 across three provinces, using enhanced surveillance with laboratory-confirmed cases to measure real-world vaccine effectiveness. The researchers will also update maps of cholera hotspots—areas where the disease keeps recurring—so that limited vaccine supplies can be targeted to the places that need them most. If successful, the study will give policymakers in Mozambique and other cholera-affected countries actionable numbers on vaccine impact, helping them decide where and when to roll out vaccination campaigns. This is applied public-health research with a direct, near-term payoff: better evidence means fewer preventable deaths during outbreaks.

View original technical description
Cholera, a poverty-related disease, is associated with significant mortality and morbidity in lower- and middle-income countries. Climate change events contribute to the occurrence of cholera outbreaks in countries like Mozambique. Safe and effective oral cholera vaccines (OCV) are available, however, scarcity of real-world vaccine effectiveness data hampered uptake of these vaccines by national stakeholders. Evidence on the value of OCVs and contemporaneous updating of cholera hotspots offer actionable data for policymakers in the targeted roll out of OCVs. In this proposal, two key objectives will be addressed: 1) update the already existing cholera hotspots maps defined 2017-2021; and 2) real-world effectiveness of OCVs in preventing cholera outbreaks. These objectives will be evaluated as part of three planned cholera vaccination campaigns by the Ministry of Health of Mozambique from 2024 to 2025. Enhanced cholera surveillance with laboratory confirmation will be employed at sentinel sites in three provinces. The existing integrated community engagement and disease detection systems will be strengthened. Outcomes of this study will have critical value in informing countries on the impact of OCV in preventing and controlling cholera outbreaks. Key words: Cholera hotspots, Oral cholera vaccine, Vaccine effectiveness. "

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Researchers

Florian Marks (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Optimizing vaccine allocation for cholera epidemics
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Original classification

Directed Call

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