“For farmers in Latin America, vampire bats live up to their dark reputation. Their bites weaken cows and open the way for infections. Worst of all, the rabies they sometimes carry can kill livestock and, occasionally, people as well. Now scientists have developed an innovative way to vaccinate the bats against the virus—by making use of their extraordinary fondness of mutual grooming.

In a study published as a biorXiv preprint on 12 June, researchers showed that after they applied an oral vaccine in the form of a thick gel to the fur of some members of a colony of common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus), mutual licking helped spread the vaccine rapidly through the population.”

From Science.

“By 2023, Gavi had worked with over 40 countries to provide the HPV vaccine to 23.7 million girls. This massive immunisation effort is projected to avert over 605,000 future deaths from cervical cancer, a testament to the vaccine’s life-saving potential.

In 2023 alone, Gavi-supported countries vaccinated more than 14 million girls – more than the total number vaccinated in the previous decade combined. Thanks to an unprecedented scale-up of vaccine introductions, dedicated investment and expanded access since 2023, Gavi is on track to reach its ambitious goal of protecting 86 million girls with the HPV vaccine by 2025, a milestone that is expected to prevent more than 1.4 million future cervical cancer deaths.”

From Gavi.

“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.