The world’s first public dengue vaccination programme was launched in the Philippines as nurses began injecting the first batch of a million children with a French drug to combat the sometimes deadly disease.

• Hundreds of fourth-graders at a public school in metropolitan Manila’s Marikina city were given the first of three shots of Dengvaxia.
• The Philippines had the highest dengue incidence in the WHO’s Western Pacific region from 2013 to 2015, recording 200,415 cases last year, according to the Department of Health.
• The government is spending 3.5 billion pesos ($98 million) to administer the free vaccines, which it bought at a discounted cost of 3,000 pesos ($85) for three doses for each child.
• Dengvaxia, developed by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur, obtained its first license in Mexico in December 2015 for use in individuals aged 9 to 45.
• Regulatory agencies in Brazil, the Philippines and El Salvador followed. But the vaccine is awaiting regulatory reviews in Europe and dozens of non-European countries, as well as prequalification by the WHO.

Dengue or haemorrhagic fever, the world’s most common mosquito-borne virus, infects an estimated 390 million people in more than 120 countries each year, killing more than 25,000, according to the World Health Organization. Asia is home to some 70 percent of cases worldwide. In the Philippines 200,000 cases were reported in 2013, according to Sanofi.