“Measles used to be an extremely common disease. Just sixty years ago, over 90% of children would have been infected by it, and of those who developed symptoms, around a quarter would be hospitalized.

The United States alone had around three to four million cases annually, leading to tens of thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths each year.

However, in 1963, John Enders developed the first effective measles vaccine. Vaccination efforts ramped up rapidly in richer countries, and in the 1970s and 1980s, they were scaled up worldwide.

In just the last fifty years, it’s estimated that measles vaccinations have prevented over ninety million deaths worldwide. Two to three million people would die from measles every year without them.”

From Our World in Data.

“The first patient has been dosed in a Phase I trial of Stablepharma’s tetanus-diphtheria vaccine, which does not need to be refrigerated.

The vaccine candidate, SPVX02, is completely stable at room temperature, and in testing was fully potent after three cycles of extreme temperature fluctuations ranging from -20°C to 40°C.  The candidate has been developed to withstand these temperatures through the company’s StablevaX technology.

In what is being branded a ‘world-first’, the first patient in the trial of SPVX02 was dosed earlier this month at a National Health Service (NHS) site in the UK. The vaccine doses of SPVX02 being used in the Phase I study also have an 18-month shelf life.”

From Clinical Trials Arena.

“Far fewer babies went to the hospital struggling to breathe from RSV, a severe respiratory infection, after the debut of a new vaccine and treatment this season, according to an analysis published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

For the new study, CDC researchers looked at RSV hospitalization rates across two different RSV surveillance networks of hospitals and medical centers (called RSV-NET and NVSN). They compared the networks’ hospitalization rates in the 2024–2025 RSV season to their respective rates in pre-pandemic seasons between 2018 and 2020. The analysis found that among newborns (0–2 months), RSV hospitalizations fell 52 percent in RSV-NET and 45 percent in NVSN compared with the rates from the 2018–2020 period.”

From Ars Technica.

“On World Malaria Day, Mali’s Ministry of Health, with support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), UNICEF and World Health Organization (WHO), launched a first-of-its-kind malaria vaccine delivery approach, aiming to reach children aged 5 to 36 months.

The country becomes the 20th in Africa to introduce the malaria vaccine into its routine immunization programme with support from Gavi. It is the first globally to implement a hybrid approach to vaccine delivery: providing the first three doses monthly throughout the year based on age, followed by the fourth and fifth doses given seasonally in May or June of the following years, before the high malaria transmission season starts. Providing malaria vaccine doses seasonally is a strategic approach, as it aligns the period of highest vaccine protection with the period of highest malaria risk, and evidence, including research from Mali, shows it maximizes impact. 

The R21/Matrix-M vaccine will initially be rolled out in 19 priority districts across five regions: Kayes, Koulikoro, Mopti, Ségou and Sikasso. The country currently has 927,800 R21/Matrix-M vaccines for introduction.”

From World Health Organization.