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University of Nebraska Medical Center

The Most Dangerous Germs Without Effective Vaccines

Gizmodo The World Health Organization has put out a hit list of germs for future vaccines to tackle. In a report published this week, WHO scientists have identified 17 widely common pathogens that most need new or improved vaccines, including influenza, HIV, norovirus, and Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. Vaccines have long been one of humanity’s most important public health accomplishments, helping control or even eradicate fearsome diseases like smallpox, polio, and most recently covid-19. But we still don’t have vaccines for many widespread diseases out there, while some current vaccines are only modestly effective against their target germ, like the seasonal flu shot. There’s only so much time and resources that can be devoted to developing vaccines, though, so researchers at the World Health Organization have compiled a list of priority germs that especially need to be taken down a peg.

The researchers first consulted with international and local experts to establish criteria for their selections. These included factors such as the annual deaths of children under five caused by a disease or the extent of a germ’s drug resistance (some of the most worrying bacteria are commonly resistant to frontline antibiotics). Then they cross-referenced these criteria with regional data to identify the ten diseases without effective vaccines most affecting a particular part of the world. These regional lists were finally combined to form a global list of 17 pathogens that deserve the most focus toward developing vaccines. The researchers’ work, detailing the creation of the list, was published Monday in the journal eBioMedicine.

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