The World Immunization Week 2019 has just started! This annual week is organised by the WHO and aims to promote the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease and create awareness about the millions of lives saved every year by this successful and cost-effective health intervention. Also, it aims to build awareness that there are nearly 20 million unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children in the world today. For more information about WIW2019 to help promote key messages please see the website.
In order to celebrateWorld Immunization Week 2019, The Vaccine Centre at LSHTM steering group
has produced a fascinating podcast series. Each episode is a recorded interview with leading vaccine academics from within and outside the School profiling different areas of research. One podcast is launched each day of the week from the 24th – 30th of April.
Episode 1 launched today is titled Progress towards a universal flu vaccine: understanding the many ‘hats’ of the influenza virus. The interview is between the Dr Petra Klepac (EPH) and Professor Sunetra Gupta from the University of Oxford and takes us through Professor Gupta’s work on mathematical modelling of the evolution of epitope diversity in infectious disease pathogens and how this can lead to a candidate universal flu vaccine.
Episode 2 is titled Learning from nature: how we can protect newborn babies even better against infections. Our network PI Beate Kampmann explains which vaccines are available to be given in pregnancy to confer the best protection to the offspring and which new vaccines are needed.
Please share widely with your networks and on social media (using the hashtag #vaccineswork) and with your non-vaccine focused contacts! Look out for additional episodes in the week to come.
On 14 March 2024, a dedicated IMPRINT session was held as part of the 6th International Maternal and Neonatal Immunisation Symposium (INMIS) in San José, Costa Rica.
