South Africa is taking the lead in the development of a maternal vaccine against group B Streptococcus (GBS), which can kill newborns and cause maternal complications.
Vaccinology expert Prof Shabir Madhi, dean of health sciences at Wits University, said SA is the country worst affected by group B strep bacteria, which kills nearly 100,000 newborns across the globe annually.
After being passed to newborns during labour and delivery, GBS can cause serious invasive infections, including meningitis, bacterial pneumonia, and sepsis. GBS also causes 37,000 cases annually of neurodevelopmental impairment, including cerebral palsy and hearing and vision loss. Prof Shabir Madhi, dean of the faculty of health at Wits and an expert on vaccines, says GBS disease in SA affects about three in 1,000 children.It is against this backdrop that the SA Medical Research Council vaccines and infectious diseases analytics research unit, which Madhi leads, is conducting clinical trials towards the development of a GBS vaccine.
“We have also shown that one out of every 20 stillbirths in SA is due to GBS, and there is some evidence to indicate that GBS infection in the mother may predispose to preterm birth, which to is a common underlying cause of death in early infancy.”
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