Health Curriculum: Unit 6--Main text: Grades 7-11

Fighting Disease:
Health At The End Of The Millennium
Another Wired Curriculum from The United Nations CyberSchoolBus

	Introduction
	How They Work
	How They Spread
	Poverty and Disease
	Prevention
	Immunization

Unit 6
Immunization

MAIN TEXT
(GRADES 7-11)

New Vaccines, New Costs

Compared to the basic EPI-six, new vaccines are considerably more expensive. Why?

Vaccines are now being developed by private companies, as opposed to government-funded labs, mostly in the industrialized countries. This has several implications:

the cost of necessary research and development is factored in

the vaccine is made and marketed for a developed world economy

the vaccines are patented by the company so that their production by a company in the developing world would require the payment of royalties

Patenting the Sun

After developing the first polio vaccine in the 1950s, Dr Jonas Salk was hailed as a hero. He lived up to that status when he waived all intellectual property rights his polio vaccine. To do otherwise would be like patenting the sun, he declared. He said vaccines belonged "to the people". What is so vital to life, in other words, should be everyone's property.

Today, with increasingly complex market economics as well as highly complicated emerging diseases, vaccines belong to private sector manufacturers and research instituted who patent the vaccines in order, partly, to cover their own research and development costs. When the hepatitis B vaccine was first developed, it was priced at $150, 150 times the cost of all six EPI vaccines.

To stay competitive in a marketplace, this may be necessary for the companies. But how can this also be reconciled with the needs of children around the world? The answer is not clear yet and new strategies are being examined.

Meanwhile, Dr Manuel Patarroyo has made his own contribution to this dilemma. Dr Patarroyo has developed a malaria vaccine - Spf66 - which is currently being tested. He has granted WHO an exclusive worldwide royalty-free licence to this vaccine. In other words, if the vaccine proves successful, it can be used against malaria without the additional costs of paying royalty fees.

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