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News/Event Item
Ailing Policy
March 27, 2008
By R. Ramachandran
Vaccines and domestic immunisation policy form a critical component of a nation’s public health care system. This is particularly true in the context of a developing country like India, where the disease burden of vaccine-preventable diseases and mortality due to them, let alone diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), are high given its large population, to which about 26 million newborns are added every year.
Vaccine development is also heavily science-and- technology-driven, especially since the advent of genetic engineering and biotechnology in the 1980s. Although vaccines form only 2 per cent of the $8 billion global pharmaceutical industry, they account for the largest share in the development of biologicals, and the amount spent on worldwide R&D on vaccines is about $2 billion. This area is dominated by multinationals such as GlaxoSmithKline Beecham, Merck, Aventis Pasteur (formerly Pasteur-Merieux Connaught), Chiron Behringer and Hoechst, and given the huge worldwide market, vaccine-related technologies are tightly held by them. Given the high disease burden in developing countries, many of these operate through the global immunisation programmes and initiatives of world bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to gain access to these markets.
© 2008, Frontline
For full article, visit:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20080411250701100.htm
category: News from Other Sources : General Health News
contributed by Liza Nanni on 27 March 2008
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