An example of population consultation project was started recently by the French Ministry of Health, Marisol Touraine, who intends to consult the population on the matter of mandatory vaccination, as a part of a wide-ranging review of immunisation policies. This initiative comes after a report confirmed that vaccination is a sensitive society issue, which needs a large consultation of all stakeholders, including the civil society, with the aim of engaging them in a discussion about immunisation and its importance to public health.
The Bulgarian health mediator model was developed based on the experience of the Dutch Institute of Public Health and on the Romanian model of health mediators, which was presented by the Romani CRISS Foundation and the Romanian Ministry of Health.
A very recent and innovative example of good practice concerning awareness campaigns is the “Italian Chart for the Promotion of Vaccinations”, a recent call for action whose website is: http://www.teamvaxitalia.it/. Namely, the Chart is the result of the efforts of the “TeamVaxItaly” movement that had been founded in a civil society meeting in Fano (Italy) in October 2015.
In 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic, vaccines were ready and could be supplied only when the peak of the pandemic was already decreasing in most European countries, discouraging people from getting vaccinated. Since the disease was not as severe as it was feared in the beginning, the consequences of this delay were not that serious, even if some lives could have been saved if the vaccines were available in advance. Ebola vaccine also arrived to West Africa when the epidemic was over, while a zika vaccine is still very far away. According to Thomas Breuer, however, GSK Chief Medical Officer, in case of another flu pandemic, a better cooperation among stakeholders and new technologies could accelerate the production and supply of new vaccines.
While USA recommend universal flu vaccination for 6 months age, some European countries have different strategies, targeting only children with chronic diseases. Susanna Esposito, professor of Paediatrics at the University of Milan, Italy and president of WAIDID (World Association for Infectious Diseases) advocates for a wider coverage against influenza in healthy children as well.
One day, eight countries, fifty participants for each of them, open discussions and a series of questions. These are the ingredients of the citizen consultations organized by ASSET on September 24th, to voice people’s opinion on epidemic preparedness and response.
Vaccines have had broad medical impact, but existing vaccine technologies and production methods are limited in their ability to respond to certain pathogens. Other hurdles are due to difficulties in large scale production. MycoSynVac project proposes a new way for developing vaccines, by using of cutting-edge synthetic biology methodologies to engineer Mycoplasma pneumoniae as a universal chassis for vaccination.
While the number of human cases of H7N9 bird flu is rising in China, and H5N1 is a persistent threat, different strategies of prevention are being considered. In a “one health” approach, vaccination of poultry is one of the possibilities, according to Ivan Hung, Clinical Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant in the Department of Medicine at the Queen Mary Hospital of the University of Hong Kong.
Parents, healthcare workers, bloggers and science communicators have launched a positive experience in Italy, with the aim of sharing and promoting scientific information towards an important public health goal: to face the drop in vaccine coverage.
