During the last three decades, the biopharmaceutical industry has invested significantly in new and improved vaccines, and the collaborative efforts of the [CDC], [the WHO], national governments and industry have led to major progress in addressing global immunization goals and reducing illness and death due to vaccine-preventable diseases.
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"The cost of immunizing children in developing countries with a five-in-one vaccine is set to fall after a deal by an Indian supplier to slash the price it charges the GAVI global vaccines group," Reuters reports.
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In advance of World Immunization Week, global experts are highlighting strategies to further advance progress on the Global Vaccine Action Plan that was endorsed by the World Health Assembly, 2012.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Impatient Optimists" blog features an interview with K.O. Antwi-Agyei, a physician who "manages the Expanded Programme on Immunization in Ghana, where he oversees the day-to-day work to ensure vaccines reach children across the country."
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"UNICEF's latest report [.pdf] on child nutrition, launched at the Dublin Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, Climate Justice hosted by the Mary Robinson Foundation and Irish Government, revealed that every year 2.3 million children under the age of five still die of malnutrition and 165 million children are stunted as a result of not receiving enough nutritious food within the first 1,000 days of life," British Member of Parliament Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of state for international development, writes in a Huffington Post U.K. "Politics" opinion piece.
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"Two more people have died in China from a new strain of bird flu, raising the death toll from the virus to 13, state media reported Sunday," the Associated Press reports.
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"More than 400 signatories to [a scientific declaration urging the world to eradicate polio], hailing from 80 countries, believe polio eradication is achievable in large part because of the great gains India has made against the disease," T. Jacob John, a retired professor of clinical virology at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, writes in the Wall Street Journal's "India Real Time" blog.
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The pathogen that we are talking about is called streptococcus pneumoniae. That is a fairly common bacteria and if you did a nasal swab you would find that quite a lot of people have this bacterium living in their nasal passages.
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"I have spent my career seeking to understand and tackling deadly viruses, from ebola to HIV. But polio stands out because, unlike these diseases, we already hold the key to its eradication: effective vaccines," Peter Piot, director and professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, writes in The Guardian's "Poverty Matters" blog.
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"Around 400 scientists from 80 countries have come together to declare that polio could be wiped off the face of the Earth in five years if plans to eliminate both wild and vaccine-derived polioviruses are implemented," SciDev.Net reports (Malhotra, 4/11).
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Hundreds of scientists, doctors and other experts from around the world launched the Scientific Declaration on Polio Eradication today, declaring that an end to the paralyzing disease is achievable and endorsing a comprehensive new strategy to secure a lasting polio-free world by 2018.
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Quest PharmaTech Inc., a pharmaceutical company developing and commercializing products for the treatment of cancer, announces that it has recently signed an exclusive license agreement with University of California at Los Angeles to develop and market anti-PSA IgE technology for the treatment of cancer.
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"The United Nations Children's Fund [on Friday] warned that it may be forced to stop humanitarian assistance to more than 100,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan due to insufficient funds," the U.N. News Centre reports.
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he Global Polio Eradication Initiative on Tuesday launched its Global Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan in Washington, D.C.
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IRIN examines Britain's new $270 million plan to improve health care services in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Writing in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Impatient Optimists" blog, foundation co-chair Bill Gates recounts his recent trip to Ghana, where he "got to watch an effective health system in action -- from the decision makers at the national level to nurses who live and work in the villages."
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Chicken pox, the childhood affliction of earlier generations, has been largely neutralized by the varicella vaccine, according to a new study by the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center, which appears in the current online issue of Pediatrics.
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"Parents and officials are going to great lengths to immunize children after militants imposed a ban on polio vaccinations in Pakistan's restive North Waziristan Agency," with some parents "traveling long distances to get their children vaccinated" or "smuggling the vaccine back home," IRIN reports.
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Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "is currently in Ghana to assess the country's health systems," Ventures Africa reports. Gates "touched down in Accra March 25, 2013, and says he is in Ghana to get firsthand information on why the country's immunization system is working so well," the news service notes (3/26).
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In a paper published in PLoS Medicine last week, researchers from the Vaccines for Africa Initiative at the University of Cape Town's Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine examine the performance of the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) in Africa since its inception in 1974.
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