Exciting news on the fight to eradicate measles came out this week with a new paper published by Robert Sievers and colleagues detailing the successful test of a new measles vaccine.
In their paper, published in the journal Vaccine, they detail the results of the first clinical trial using the new vaccine. What makes this so heartening is that the Sievers vaccine is a dry powder to be inhaled—no injections, no need to reconstitute the powder with clean water, easy transport and no sharps waste either. Their study showed that both men who received the typical measles injection and those who received the powdered form mounted similar immune responses.
This is great news for two major reasons: 1) the WHO announced this year that we are actually slipping the fight against measles, with significant increases in cases occurring over the past few years and 2) there remains a lot of misinformation and distrust around the current measles vaccine linking it to neurological issues like autism. Even though this connection has ben disproven over and over, many parents (especially in the US and Europe) refuse to vaccinate. The powder might prove to be an alternative they are willing to partake in.
Either way, this new vaccine is nothing to sneeze at.
Read the paper here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X14013620
---Lauren Sweet
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