Vaccination: rattling the supply chain

The first decade of this century was perhaps the most productive in the history of vaccine development, seeing the release of a plethora of new life-saving vaccines for rotavirus diarrhoea, types of meningitis and pneumonia, and for human papillomavirus (HPV) infections that cause cervical cancer. “We are in a very different situation now compared to 10 years ago,” says Dr Osman Mansoor at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in New York. Mansoor, who is UNICEF’s senior health adviser for the Expanded Programme on Immunization and New Vaccines, notes that more vaccines are in the pipeline. In fact more than 80 vaccines are in the late stages of clinical testing, and 30 of them are designed to protect against major diseases including dengue and malaria.