An international team of health and medical researchers including workers at the WHO, working with economists and modeling specialists, has found that the use of vaccines to prevent or treat disease has saved the lives of approximately 154 million people over the past half-century.
In their study, published in The Lancet, the group used mathematical and statistical modeling to develop estimates for lives saved due to vaccines and then added them together to find the total.
...while fast-tracking candidate vaccines represents a positive step forward in the race to stop these outbreaks and to improve global health security, it raises an important question. If vaccine candidates already existed for both of these viruses before the outbreaks began, then why weren’t investigational stockpiles of vaccine ready to go when the first cases were detected?
The latest outbreak killed 55 of the 143 people infected since September, according to health ministry figures. Six of the fatalities were health workers.
This outbreak, the first in a decade of the less common Sudan strain, is a chance for clinical trials of the three vaccines donated by the U.S.-based Sabin Vaccine Institute, University of Oxford and Merck.