vaccines

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January 12, 2012 | 10:56 AM | By

India marks one year without polio, inches toward eradication goal line

UNICEF

Child receives polio vaccine

India will have made it one year, as of Friday, without a reported case of polio — a milestone everyone in the global health community is celebrating.

Except for maybe all those skeptics who say, or said, polio will never be eradicated.

The goal here is a world completely without polio, of course, since if this infectious disease exists anywhere it can spread everywhere — as China recently discovered.

But this accomplishment by India, which not that long ago had the world’s lion share of polio cases, does a lot to get us closer to the day when this crippling, sometimes deadly, disease is eradicated.

I’ve seen the ravages of polio in poor countries and, back in 2003 when I was a reporter for the Seattle PI, traveled to parts of India where the polio cases were exploding and reported on the country’s difficulties trying to rid itself of this infectious disease.

It may sound a simple enough goal to vaccinate all kids against polio, but it’s not. I can attest to how complex and challenging it has been — because of the nature of this disease, the lack of health care resources in the countries most in need and the various forms of political opposition that can emerge to obstruct what might seem to many an obvious good.

India’s not out of the woods yet and the disease remains entrenched in three countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. But the fact that India appears to have completely rid itself of this disease is evidence that the global campaign to eradicate polio is that much closer to reality.

Indian health officials deserve a lot of credit for reaching this milestone, but credit for getting us where we are today should go first to Rotary International — which for decades has sustained the global vaccination effort against all odds (and lots of skepticism) — and then to organizations like UNICEF, the World Health Organization and, lately, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation has thrown a lot of money at this effort over the last ten years or so. Both Bill Gates and his father Bill Sr. also have been outspoken public champions of polio eradication — even to the point of apparently finally winning over the world’s leading polio eradication skeptic D.A. Henderson.

Here’s Bill Gates’ celebrating India’s achievement on Huffington Post

Other news stories of note:

Globe and Mail: How India conquered polio

Washington Post: Polio focus leaves other diseases behind

Reuters: India’s victory fuels endgame vaccine talks

Scientific American: India on track to be declared polio free

 

FILED UNDER: Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, eradication, India, polio, Rotary International, UNICEF, vaccines, World Health Organization
October 18, 2011 | 9:00 AM | By

Queen of England bestows honor on PATH’s gizmo guy

Flickr, UK Ministry of Defence

Queen Elizabeth

The Queen of England has bestowed an exalted honor on PATH’s top gizmo guy.

“She said global health was a rather big subject and must involve a lot of travel,” said Michael Free, chief of technology for PATH, who had in fact stopped off in London to be received by the Queen before embarking on a month-long trip of global health travel.

Last week, Free was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his team’s many inventions and innovative approaches aimed at helping solve health problems in the developing world. It’s not quite as prestigious as a Knighthood but better than a sharp poke in the helmet.

PATH

Michael Free

One of Free’s inventions was the single-use, auto-disabling syringe — a device now in common use worldwide, here in the U.S. as well, aimed at reducing the transmission of disease through accidental needle sticks.

But Free was also likely honored for his much broader and critical role in helping give birth to PATH in the 1970s.

How this British farm boy, raised in creamy Devonshire, ended up in Seattle working on some of the most innovative solutions to developing world health problems offers insight into the evolution of PATH and, to some extent, the entire field of global health.

“In the beginning, our approach was not well-received by either the public or private sectors,” said Free. “It was a bit out-of-the-box.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Battelle, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, condoms, family planning, GAVI, Michael Free, PATH, Queen Elizabeth, vaccines
September 27, 2011 | 1:03 PM | By

The obscure bug that set off Bill Gates, awakening a geeky giant

Tom Paulson

Nelson Zambrana cradles his child sick from rotavirus in Nicaraguan hospital

It kills anywhere from a quarter-million to half-a-million kids every year and is one of the world’s leading causes of child mortality.

But it wasn’t too long ago hardly anybody had even heard of it.

Rotavirus — the killer bug that set off Bill Gates and gave direction to his philanthropy.

“No matter where we looked in the world, about 40 percent of all kids under 5 years old in hospitals for severe and life-threatening diarrhea had rotavirus,” said John Wecker, head of Seattle-based PATH’s vaccine access and delivery program. PATH has a long history advocating for a rotavirus vaccine.

“We’d go into these countries where huge numbers of kids were dying from diarrhea and they’d say ‘Rota what?” Wecker said. “We don’t have that here. Nobody had ever heard of it.”

Today, an international group that represents the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation‘s single largest philanthropic project aimed at expanding children’s vaccinations announced it was launching a major new global jab against rotavirus and another big killer of young children, pneumococcal disease. The campaign focuses on Africa, where these two infectious diseases are rampant.

“The death toll of rotavirus and pneumococcal infections in Africa is particularly devastating, and this is where these vaccines will make the most significant impact, not only in lives saved, but also in terms of healthy lives lived,” said Seth Berkley, CEO of this group known as GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.

It’s a major milestone for GAVI, for a number of reasons, but in a way just another big step forward in a decade of significant progress for this alliance created to expand access to childhood immunizations in poor countries.

Since it was launched, hundreds of millions of children have been vaccinated and an estimated 5 million deaths prevented.

That’s more deaths averted than has so far been credited to the much-larger Global Fund for Fighting AIDS, TB and Malaria — or any other single project in the global health arena, for that matter. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, John Wecker, pneumococcal disease, rotavirus, Seth Berkley, vaccines
September 26, 2011 | 12:08 PM | By

Polio spreading from Pakistan to China

UNICEF

Child receiving oral polio vaccine

This is a discouraging reminder that global health is truly global, especially when it comes to infectious disease.

As NPR’s Joe Neel reports today, Pakistan’s failure to eliminate polio appears to have spilled over into China and threatens to spread even wider. Neel reports:

The World Health Organization says the rates of polio in Pakistan have caused it to rate as “high” the risk of further international spread of the wild poliovirus from Pakistan …  there is particular concern with large population movements around the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Nov. 4-9.

Here are some other similar reports from Inter Press and the Washington Post, noting that this strain of the virus is more dangerous in that it is more easily spread.

The Economist says a “surge against polio” is needed now if the long-sought goal of polio eradication is to be achieved. A week or so ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put out this video urging the international community to finish the job and eradicate polio:

Why is polio so especially difficult to control in Pakistan?

Poverty and lack of adequate health services are two reasons. But much poorer countries have succeeded in ridding themselves of this disabling and once rampant disease.

Conflict in Pakistan is also part of the problem. It’s difficult territory for humanitarian organizations. And foreign health campaigns may be especially mistrusted these days — given the U.S. and the West’s already strained relationship with Pakistan and this unfortunate CIA “fake vaccination” ploy done there a while ago.

FILED UNDER: Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pakistan, polio, vaccines
July 18, 2011 | 10:34 AM | By

Fight against top cause of deadly diarrhea, rotavirus, launched today

Tom Paulson

No doctor, no medicine at clinic in rural Nigeria

It is a stunning fact that bears repeating:

Diarrhea is one the world’s big killers. Every year, diarrhea is estimated to kill anywhere from one to 2 million people, children mostly — about as many die annually from malaria.

Much of this is due to dirty, contaminated water.

But a major cause of the most severe and deadly form of diarrhea is a bug called rotavirus. Bill Gates has said it was when he read about this virus, or more accurately the stunning number of deaths it causes in poor countries (about 500,000, a half to a third of the global diarrhea death toll), that initially set him on his global health mission as a philanthropist.

Today, a global immunization project (which, not incidentally, was launched by the Gates Foundation and Seattle-based PATH a decade ago) has started expanding access in Africa to vaccines that prevent rotavirus infection.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, GAVI, today announced the first child — in Khartoum, Sudan — to be vaccinated in a new rotavirus immunization campaign that aims to reach millions of vulnerable children in 40 low- or middle-income countries.

“Rotavirus vaccines save children’s lives and our mission is to ensure we get these vaccines to children in Africa and throughout the developing world as quickly as possible. These are the places where rotavirus has the most devastating impact”, said Helen Evans, GAVI interim CEO.

GAVI, as you may recall, recently completed a highly successful fund-raising campaign that has allowed it to expand its portfolio of vaccines to include new vaccines against pneumonia and rotavirus.

Here’s a nice perspective on the rotavirus vaccine roll-out by John Wecker of PATH, one of those who have worked for years to expand access to the vaccine worldwide.

 

FILED UNDER: Health, GAVI, John Wecker, rotavirus vaccine, vaccines
July 14, 2011 | 1:22 PM | By

Three reasons why CIA faked vaccines may cause contagion of damage

Flickr, johanoomen

New Action Thriller: From UNICEF with Love?

Now that the CIA has acknowledged running a deceptive, if not totally fake, vaccination program in Pakistan as part of the effort months ago to hunt down Osama bin Laden, here are three reasons why this episode is prompting an angry response by those who work against global poverty and disease:

  1. This isn’t just about vaccines — about fighting terrorism vs fighting polio.
  2. Health workers and aid workers overseas have to be seen as neutral and independent if they are to operate effectively and safely.
  3. National security isn’t achieved just by hunting and killing bad guys. It’s also achieved through humanitarian efforts, aid efforts and other forms of international collaboration based on mutual trust.

So let’s review where we are so far with the strange case of “The Immunizer of Abbottabad.”

After The Guardian on Monday first revealed this bizarre scheme aimed at collecting DNA from bin Laden family members, the CIA apparently has confirmed to the Washington Post that it did set up the vaccination program in northern Pakistan. Here’s what some anonymous official reportedly told the newspaper:

A senior U.S. official said the vaccine campaign was conducted by medical professionals and should not be construed as a “fake public health effort.”

“People need to put this into some perspective,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The vaccination campaign was part of the hunt for the world’s top terrorist, and nothing else.”

“If the United States hadn’t shown this kind of creativity, people would be scratching their heads asking why it hadn’t used all tools at its disposal to find bin Laden.”

Actually, many seem to be scratching their heads asking how the Central Intelligence Agency (given its middle name) came up with such a far-fetched scheme — it doesn’t appear to have worked — and how it can argue with a straight face that this was, in addition to a covert op, a legitimate vaccination program.

To begin with, just giving kids a real Hepatitis B vaccine doesn’t mean it’s not fake public health. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Alanna Shaikh, CIA, James Fallows, national security, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, vaccines
June 30, 2011 | 12:27 PM | By

Al Jazeera: The great billion-dollar drug (and vaccine) scam?

Flickr, anolob

The pharmaceutical industry often trots out some pretty stunning numbers to explain why their drugs cost so much. A journalist and South African scholar scrutinizes the numbers for Al Jazeera.

In the first part of a two-part series called “The great billion dollar drug scam,” investigative journalist Khadija Sharife begins her analysis (interestingly, oddly, labeled by Al Jazeera as an opinion piece) with a focus on the Gates Foundation-backed global vaccination project known as GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization:

Alongside pneumococcal diseases such as meningitis and pneumonia, rotavirus-related diarrhoea is a primary childhood killer in developing countries, thought to snuff out the lives of 500,000 children each and every year. An overwhelming 85 per cent of these children are African and Asian. The need for medical miracles is as great as ever, but corporate mispricing generates huge profits, while driving up the price of life saving medicines.

British-based drug corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) recently offered a five-year deal to supply poor nations with 125 million doses of the rotavirus vaccine – Rotarix – at $2.50 a dose, just five per cent of the current going price in Western markets. Through the GAVI group, the international vaccine agency financed by developed nations such as the UK, it is hoped that GSK and pharmaceutical multinational Merck – who, between them, dominate the rotavirus vaccine market – will provide a secure line of low-cost drugs for as many as forty countries in the near future.

But is it really a discount, and if so, who is paying the cost?

I think this is easy enough to answer: Yes, these are clearly discounts (about one-tenth what the vaccine costs in the U.S.) and we in the rich world are basically subsidizing cheaper vaccines for the poor world.

Is it enough of a discount? Some think not. Others think we’re getting a pretty good deal and need to be more sympathetic to the much-maligned drug industry. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Justice, Science, drug industry, GAVI, pricing, R&D, vaccines