The Need for Vaccines

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 14 million people die each year from communicable diseases. While vaccines have proven the single most cost effective means of controlling the spread of infectious disease, we lack effective, affordable vaccines for a wide variety of potentially preventable infections. This is especially true for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and dengue fever that disproportionately affect resource poor countries.

There are two primary reasons we still lack these vaccines. First, the vaccine technologies that produced our current available vaccines have proven ineffective for these diseases. Second, although these and other diseases affect hundreds of millions of people annually and billions more are at risk, decisions regarding new vaccine development by large, commercial vaccine companies are necessarily driven primarily by economic factors rather than global public health need.

Furthermore, existing vaccines that have dramatically reduced the burden of infectious diseases in wealthy countries are often not accessible in the developing world because of the costs associated with manufacturing, delivering and administering these vaccines. Because of these prohibitive costs, the developing world lacks access to these vaccines and billions of people are at risk to contract diseases that are entirely preventable. For example, newly-developed, excellent vaccines for noravirus and human papilloma virus are not affordable for people in the developing world, even with deep discounts from their retail prices of $181.50 and $364 respectively.

 

The first African women to get a prototype HIV vaccine developed by current CVI faculty.

 

In 1990 the Commission on Health Research for Development estimated that less than 10 percent of the funds dedicated to global health research were applied to health problems of the developing world, which accounts for over 90 percent of the world’s health problems. The developing world still receives a similarly small percentage of funds despite the dramatic rise in resources devoted to global health research from an estimated $55.9 billion in 1996 to an estimated $105.9 billion in 2001, according to the WHO.

Your support of CVI ensures that your investment contributes to research of the diseases that affect those most in need, and will lead to the development of vaccines against the diseases that pose the greatest threat to global public health.