Data from the US Center for Disease Control shows that around 2.86 million people get chlamydia each year.
Data from the US Center for Disease Control shows that around 2.86 million people get chlamydia each year. There could be more as most people who get infected by the sexually transmitted infection (STI) don’t have symptoms and don’t get tested. Now, a new vaccine for Chlamydia is available.
The disease is common and treatable. It could cause infertility, genital tract infections, eye infections or pelvic inflammatory disease if left untreated. Medication can stop this infection, but it cannot reverse permanent damage done by the disease.
For women, the more chlamydial infections they get, the greater the risk of serious reproductive complications is. These reproductive complications include ectopic pregnancy and pelvic inflammatory disease.
Vaccination is the ideal way to prevent infection, but efforts to develop a vaccine have not produced anything over the last thirty years. None of the test-vaccines was approved for use in humans
Now, researchers are on their way to creating the first protective vaccine against this sexually transmitted infection. The development could prevent unwanted consequences of untreated Chlamydia.
David Bulir from McMaster University and his team have published their findings in the journal Vaccine. Their team has worked on BD584, a new antigen for Chlamydia. It is a potential candidate that could be used against many strains of Chlamydia and it could prevent health complications in people who don’t know they have it.
The results point to the fact that highly conserved proteins of the strain T3SS could represent ideal candidate for a Chlamydia vaccine. This novel vaccine is going to be administered through the nose. This way, the process would be painless and easy. Administering the vaccine could be done by less highly trained health professionals. In turn, this would make it an inexpensive solution to fight Chlamydia in developing nations.
So far, the results look very promising. The vaccine seems to be effective and it could even protect against all C trachomatis strains, some of which cause trachoma. Trachoma is an infection of the fallopian tubes which get blocked with fluids and it is caused by Chlamydia.
The next step is testing the vaccine on other strains of Chlamydia and using different formulations to determine the ideal concentration. The study was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.
Image Source – Flickr
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