New diagnostic tools for yellow fever

Abstract

In 2015, a major yellow fever outbreak swept through Angola and Congo with 965 confirmed cases, 400 of which were fatal.1 Two years later, in September 2017, another yellow fever outbreak in Africa occurred in Nigeria, with 47 confirmed cases reported by 15 July 2018.2 In South America, we are currently experiencing the largest yellow fever outbreak in the past decades. By May 2018, 1266 cases were confirmed.2 Despite the implementation of multiple vaccination strategies, vaccine coverage for yellow fever remains too low to prevent outbreaks in high-risk areas.3 Based on a study by Shearer et al., although vaccine coverage did increase since 1970, their findings estimated that between 393.7 million and 472.9 million (361.4–396.0 million people in Africa; 32.2–76.9 million people in Latin America) still need to be vaccinated in yellow fever risk zones to achieve the WHO threshold coverage of 80% to prevent an outbreak.3