Leveraging Partnerships
Wayne Pisano
Next to clean drinking water and good nutrition, vaccines have saved more lives than any other public-health intervention in modern history. Immunization programs have wiped out smallpox, eradicated polio virus in the Western Hemisphere and begun to control childhood killers such as measles and tetanus. According to the World Health Organization, vaccines prevent 2.5 million deaths worldwide annually. As additional vaccines are introduced worldwide, the number of lives saved and human suffering averted will continue to grow.
Despite these accomplishments, large gaps remain in the delivery of existing vaccines to people in poor countries and in development of new vaccines to combat diseases that are more common in the developing world. Pneumonia and diarrhea, for example, kill 3.8 million children younger than five each year although both are vaccine-preventable. And no effective vaccines are available to prevent infection by some of the largest killers in poor countries. These include HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, which together kill many millions of people a year.
Experts in international health attribute the gaps to problems, or failures, in three key areas - science has yet to make needed breakthroughs against certain diseases; markets are not always able to support incentives to produce needed medicines; and public-health systems in poor countries have limited resources to deal with complex problems.
There is growing recognition that tackling complex and systemic problems in international public health are beyond the capacity of any one sector.
