The search for a vaccine against disabling chikungunya virus, endemic among 1.3 billion people living in the tropics and sub-tropics, is moving full speed ahead. With promising options in the pipeline—including a modified measles vaccine—epidemiologists, vaccine…
Deaths from wildly infectious measles are lower than ever, dropping south of 100,000 for the first time in 2016, according to the WHO.With the help of Gavi and 5.5 billion measles vaccine doses doled out since 2000, deaths plummeted 84% from 2000-2016, from 550,100 to 89,…
Yesterday’s announcement that WHO has prequalified the first conjugate vaccine for typhoid offers a major boost to prevention efforts against a disease that causes 11–20 million cases annually and up to 161,000 deaths. The vaccine—Bharat Biotech’s Typbar-TCV®—offers…
Shrinking malaria’s toll is a great health success of our time—but it still kills 430,000 people annually, 70% of them under 5.The RTS,S vaccine is taking a stab at shrinking those numbers—set to be piloted on hundreds of thousands of children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in…
Courageous reporting on the pseudoscience that stoked fear in Japan about the HPV vaccine landed Riko Muranaka the prestigious John Maddox prize prize last week.
The Philippines has halted a dengue immunization campaign after a drug manufacturer announced its flagship vaccine could make the disease worse in people not previously infected. The alarm was raised after an 11-year-old boy with congenital heart disease died after…
Vaccine campaigns declared victory against measles, once an everyday global killer, by 2000. In Texas, it could return within the year, warns veteran vaccine developer and pro-immunization frontman Peter Hotez.Wildly-contagious measles commands 95% immunity to avoid an…
India should overturn its August decision to grant Pfizer a patent on its pneumonia vaccine Prevnar13 (PCV13), Médecins Sans Frontières is arguing in a Delhi court today.
Does a 250-pound male linebacker need the same flu vaccine as a 120-pound female dancer? Probably not. Biomedical research has established that factors such as gender, age and body composition can affect the body’s immune responses prompted by vaccination. Pregnancy, a…
Nearly 100 years after the 1918 flu pandemic claimed as many as 50 million lives, many of us would like to think such devastating losses will never be seen again. Unfortunately, the experts say otherwise. Despite a century’s worth of lifesaving scientific and medical…
