Scientists have a strong idea of which types of viruses could cause an outbreak. We can fund vaccines and treatments for them now.
The Coler Lab at Seattle Children’s Research Institute is using their expertise to support the clinical trial of an experimental coronavirus vaccine funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The trial is being conducted at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, part of NIAID’s Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium.
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
Fewer adult women are becoming infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), a trend that includes females who have never received the HPV vaccine, a new study reports.
It appears that enough women have gotten the HPV vaccine to create "herd immunity" that will provide some protection to females who go unvaccinated, said lead researcher Dr. Abbey Berenson.
By Bobbi Nodell and Alex Murphy
As 400,000 people a year are still being killed by malaria, researchers in Seattle are fervently working on a vaccine.
How close are they?
Well, they have several hurdles left but in the next 10 years, there very well could be a malaria vaccine given enough funding, said researchers Stefan Kappe and Jim Kublin, who are working on a vaccine candidate at the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CID Research) in Seattle.
Christopher Sanford, Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Global Health at the University of Washington and recognized expert in Tropical medicine, was featured on Outbreak News This Week Radio Show's Podcast to discuss a number of travel health related issues to include vaccines, malaria, yellow fever, traveler’s diarrhea.
“I want to live in a reality where we take vaccines for granted,” says Augustine Ajuogu. He grew up in Nigeria, where he saw firsthand the devastating effects of diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. In fact, he lost an uncle to TB.
Now a third-year medical student at the UW School of Medicine, Ajuogu has a goal.
“I’m focused on reducing the impact of treatable diseases, and the way I want to do that is through vaccines and drugs,” he says. “I imagine a world free from the threat of infectious diseases.”
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By Mary Engel
Researchers may be one step closer to a truly effective malaria vaccine, a new study suggests. A genetically modified malaria parasite worked as designed in its first human clinical trial, causing neither malaria nor serious safety problems in the 10 people who volunteered to be infected. It also stimulated an immune response that holds out promise of a more protective vaccine than the single candidate now in pilot studies
By Jessica Berman
A genetically engineered malaria vaccine has been shown to prevent the disease in mice, researchers say. The findings offer hope of halting the illness in humans, as well as stopping transmission of the mosquito-borne disease.
Researchers at the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) at the University of Washington, in conjunction with the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center, have developed a vaccine that uses the entire malaria-causing parasite — called P. falciparum — to stimulate a protective immune response.
Creating protective immunity against the early liver stage of malaria infection is feasible, but has been difficult to achieve in regions with high rates of malaria infection. Many current malaria vaccines target the pre-erythrocytic stage of infection in the liver, however in endemic regions, increased blood stage exposure is associated with decrease vaccine efficacy, challenging current malaria vaccine efforts.
By Kristina Adams Waldorf, Michael Gale Jr., and Lakshmi Rajagopal
Eight months after President Barack Obama requested emergency funding to support the US response to the Zika virus outbreak, Congress finally passed a $1.1 billion funding package. The funding, though welcome, is only about half of what the nation’s top health experts believe is needed to combat this new global health emergency.
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