Vaccines global approach

The application of vaccine technology forms a core element of modern medicinal endeavour. It plays a central role in both human and veterinary medicine and represents the only commonly employed prophylactic (i.e. preventative) approach undertaken to control many infectious diseases. The current (annual) global vaccine market stands at in excess of US 3 billion. Immunization programmes, particularly those undertaken on a multinational scale, have served to reduce dramatically the incidence of many killer/disabling diseases, such as smallpox, polio and tuberculosis. 

The Advanced Purchase Commitments approach proposed by Kremer and Glennerster (2004) and the Center for Global Development (2005) has attracted considerable public attention as well as seed funding from the Gates Foundation in recent years. Advanced purchase commitments could be useful for certain types of pharmaceutical products, principally vaccines, to stimulate research by promising a subsidy of a fixed value per unit for a given number of units. The most attractive candidate product for such a commitment is a malaria vaccine, since the health (and economic) benefits from an effective malaria vaccine could be very large. 

Vaccine safety is a global issue. Collaborative approaches are fundamental to improve precision of the identification of clusters or signals of vaccine safety issues. Europe has looked into a system to enhance the accurate detection of rare AEFI by looking beyond individual coxmtry boundaries. The Vaccine Adverse Events Surveillance and Com-mxmication consortium was set up to establish a European Safety Datalink. They have proposed a shared protocol, with standard case definitions and methods of analysis. 

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