Vaccinations for Neuroinfectious Disease: A Global Health Priority

Abstract

Vaccines for neuroinfectious diseases are becoming an ever-increasing global health priority, as neurologic manifestations and sequelae from existing and emerging central nervous system infections account for significant worldwide morbidity and mortality. The prevention of neurotropic infections can be achieved through globally coordinated vaccination campaigns, which have successfully eradicated nonzoonotic agents such as the variola viruses and, hopefully soon, poliovirus. This review discusses vaccines that are currently available or under development for zoonotic flaviviruses and alphaviruses, including Japanese and tick-borne encephalitis, yellow fever, West Nile, dengue, Zika, encephalitic equine viruses, and chikungunya. Also discussed are nonzoonotic agents, including measles and human herpesviruses, as well as select bacterial, fungal, and protozoal pathogens. While therapeutic vaccines will be required to treat a multitude of ongoing infections of the nervous system, the ideal vaccination strategy is preexposure vaccination, with the ultimate goals of minimizing disease associated with zoonotic viruses and the total eradication of nonzoonotic agents.

Vaccines against candidiasis: Status, challenges and emerging opportunity

“…The concept of live attenuated vaccines came from the Vaccinia virus, which causes cowpox in cattle but cross-protects smallpox in humans ( Riedel, 2005 ). Live-attenuated vaccine strategy is commonly and effectively used in combating viral diseases such as influenza, polio, mumps, rubella, measles, varicella, and rotavirus ( Saccente and Woods, 2010 ; Leibovitch and Jacobson, 2016 ). Such approaches have been taken to develop a vaccine against SARS-COV2 also, and it appears to be the lifesaver against COVID19 ( Sapkal et al., 2021 ).…”

Acute or Subacute Infectious Encephalitis: How to Approach?

“…Absence of proper treatment to neurotropic virus has strongly led to emphasis on prevention [64]. Effect of a 5-year vaccination campaign in Nepal for the prevention of Japanese encephalitis virus showed that cases of disease were reduced by 78% [65].…”

Potential for treatment and a Zika virus vaccine

“…The first discovered and approved for human use is the 17D strain of yellow fever virus, which accumulated multiple stable and attenuating mutations throughout its genome after serial passaging in vitro . Researchers have also used 17D as a backbone to create chimeric vaccine strains for other flaviviruses, including Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), DENV, West Nile and St. Louis encephalitis viruses, although only the first two have finished clinical trials and been approved for use in certain countries [11*, 12*, 13]. These recombinant vaccines replace the genes encoding the envelope (E) and pre-membrane (PrM) proteins of 17D with the ones from their respective viruses (the DENV vaccine includes genes for the 4 most common serotypes) [14*].…”