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International
health officials are scrambling to find meningitis C vaccines as an outbreak of
the child-killing disease threatens to balloon. The first large-scale outbreak of the C strain
in decades has already killed 800 of 12,000 people infected this year in
Nigeria and neighboring Niger. The World Health Organization says experts have
been taken by surprise. Cases have been increasing since 2013.
Health officials want to stockpile 5 million
doses but manufacturers say they cannot produce that amount.
Nigerian health leaders
this week repeated demands that the government reopen a lab in Lagos which once
produced millions of vaccines. The director of Nigeria's Centre for Disease
Control, Abdulsalami Nasidi, says he fears the potential number of fatalities
if a vaccine shortage and meningitis epidemic collide.
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