IVI and Egypt

IVI Signatory Country

On April 22, 1997, The Permanent Representative of the Egyptian Arab Republic to the United Nations, H.E. Nabil Elaraby, signed the IVI Establishment Agreement at UN Headquarters in New York City.

Vaccinology Course

Since 2000, five Egyptian researchers have graduated from IVI’s Vaccinology course. In 2019, two researchers from the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population attended.

Host Country: Shigella-Dysentery Study

From 1995 to 1998, a group of researchers from IVI, the Abu Homos Field Research and Training Center in the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population, U.S. Naval Medical Research Units 2 and 3, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health studied the epidemiology of shigella among 397 young children residing in Abu Homos on the Nile River Delta. Researchers regularly visited the homes of the children to conduct surveys and collect samples.

The study revealed that shigella was the third most common cause of bacterial diarrhea in local children, with an incidence rate of 0.2 shigella cases per child-year. The researchers discovered that the most common shigella serotypes were S. flexneri and S. sonnei, and that a polyvalent vaccine could prevent up to 78% of shigella cases.

Host Country: IVI E. Coli Study

From 1998 to 2000, IVI researchers worked with scientists from the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population, the US Naval Medical Research Unit -3 in Cairo, the US NIH, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, SBL vaccine, and SmithKline Beecham on a field trial of a killed oral vaccine against enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC). This trial was the first ever efficacy study of an ETEC vaccine in infants and toddlers, who are at high risk for ETEC diarrhea in countries where ETEC is endemic.

Approximately 750 residents of Abu Homos, near Alexandria, were enrolled between 1998 and 2000. The enrolled were given either the killed oral ETEC vaccine or a placebo. The results of this vaccination study showed the vaccine was safe and immunogenic in 2 to 12-year-old children, and that the vaccine clearly induced systemic antibody responses in subjects living in an area where ETEC is endemic.