Search Results

Innovative preventive vaccines against emerging and neglected infectious diseases, such as Zika, dengue, influenza, and HIV/AIDS, are examined from a global sustainability perspective in this chapter, aiming to integrate public health and innovation governance approaches. Innovation-intensive vaccines with reduced adverse effects can have an enormous impact on life expectancy and on the quality of life of the global population, but in contrast only one of the SDGs, SDG3, refers directly to vaccines (3.b.1). However, this chapter also identifies seven other SDGs strongly related to vaccines and six additional SDGs related to vaccines, leading to a total of 14 vaccine-related goals in 17 SDGs. Two of these goals are related to innovation and technological development of vaccines (SDG9 and SDG17). The authors examine vaccine performance indicators and current technological and regulatory obstacles to achieve these goals, particularly affecting developing countries, and propose STI governance strategies to overcome these gaps and increase access to vaccines. Policy recommendations for vaccine funding and incentives for innovation, development, and vaccine production are made. Recommendations are also given for specific vaccine STI performance indicators and strategies to achieve the 14 vaccine-related SDGs.

This chapter surveys the history of vaccine research and development in China's wartime hinterlands during the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War, considering first a major project launched by the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and then, in turn, the major cities of Chongqing, Guiyang, and Lanzhou. Although urban areas were not the only places where medical researchers, students, and administrators worked, they were significant hubs for coordination and exchange. The development of vaccine production in cities coincided with the deployment of new and coercive strategies for immunization, reflecting the ongoing militarization of Chinese society. Yet many urban dwellers welcomed vaccination as a means of defending themselves against disease at a time when the Japanese offensive threatened to cause epidemic catastrophe both directly, through biological warfare, and indirectly, by causing large-scale migrations of refugees and soldiers across the country. Attempts to establish a certification system that connected immunization status to free passage on ships and roads suggested the increasing importance of biology to individual rights and freedoms in wartime China.

This chapter outlines the different ways of combatting viruses. Smallpox was the most lethal of the recurrent childhood infections, and, until the late eighteenth century, had it all its own way. But in 1715, when smallpox virus infected Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the fightback began. This turn of events gave Lady Mary a keen interest in smallpox that led, a few years later, to the first successful prevention of the disease in Europe. However, inoculation was obviously not entirely safe and was not universally accepted. Despite this, it continued to be popular until 1798, when Edward Jenner published the details of a safer alternative: vaccination. Following smallpox, rabies virus was the next to be prevented by a vaccine, this time produced by microbiologist Louis Pasteur working in Paris in the mid 1800s. From the mid 1950s onwards, a surge in production saw vaccines against common viruses like polio, measles, rubella, and mumps, as well as common bacterial infections like diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, being rolled out to all children in western countries. The chapter then looks at how these vaccines were prepared and the recent advances in vaccinology spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic. It also considers flu vaccines, subunit vaccines, and microbial treatments.

This chapter discusses microbiology in China's early twentieth century. In contrast to other narratives, the emergence of microbiology as a discipline in China during the early twentieth century did not rely on any single organization, charismatic leader, or colonial influence. Instead, multiple institutes and universities in Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and other cities emerged as centers for research, and a small group of highly educated physicians and scientists participated in global research networks, even as they trained Chinese students and advised local health administrations. In the 1920s and 1930s, emerging fields such as immunology, virology, and bacteriology were identified with broader categories of inquiry, such as the medical sciences or microbiology. In addition to laboratory research, Chinese researchers translated new terms into Chinese and established professional organizations. Although research programs in microbiology were productive, their applications to public health were limited to specific projects in major cities. One important urban institution was the National Epidemic Prevention Bureau. After its 1919 establishment in Beijing, the bureau became a center for vaccine production and sponsored limited urban immunization campaigns. The outbreak of formal war with Japan in 1937 and the subsequent move of many researchers to the southwest disrupted the development of microbiology in China. Yet it also created opportunities for new cooperative relationships to form in the field of public health.