Guinea-Bissau abandons dangerous clinical trial for infants

Guinea-Bissau has abandoned a controversial hepatitis B vaccine trial that planned to follow 14,000 newborns, with half vaccinated at birth and the other half at six weeks. The WHO warned that delaying vaccination could expose infants to chronic infections, cirrhosis and liver cancer, and noted that vaccination within 24 hours of birth has been recommended for decades. The project, led by a Danish team and funded by the United States, prompted six members of the University of Southern Denmark’s ethics committee to resign after it approved the study on September 30. Guinea-Bissau’s government has banned vaccine trials involving children, and police seized a stock of vaccines at the research center at the heart of the dispute.