Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 16 February 2007:
Vol. 315. no. 5814, p. 925
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5814.925d
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

ScienceScope

Five nations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are dangling a $1.5 billion carrot in hopes that the pharmaceutical industry will produce a vaccine for the developing world against Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia and meningitis. Last week, the consortium pledged to purchase future vaccines at a guaranteed price once the product is proven safe and effective. Pneumococcal infections kill as many as 1.6 million people annually, most of them children. "Now companies know that if they have the technology and they build a plant, they can sell the vaccine," says Robert Black of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Black says the arrangement can also be a tool against other diseases plaguing poor nations.




To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)