Thanks to Pap tests, fatal cervical cancers are almost unknown today in rich countries. But the disease kills an estimated 275,000 women a year in poor countries where Pap tests are impractical and the vaccine is far too expensive for the average woman to afford, so the price cut could lead to a significant advance in women’s health.

Dr. Peter Hotez, the preeminent virologist, microbiologist, President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and distinguished professor at Baylor College of Medicine where he is the founding Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, recently posted a new article on the PLOS blog that cites marked improvements in the fight to eliminate Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) in developing countries, as well as new initiatives that still need to gain traction in the public sector in order to bolster these efforts.

In an article published today on Reuters, Sabin Executive Vice President Dr. Ciro de Quadros and Tony Nelson of the ROTA Council describe how actions taken by Latin American countries to protect children from rotavirus, the leading cause of diarhea hospitalizations and deaths, could be used in other regions of the world severely impacted by this killer disease of children.

Last May the World Health Assembly passed a ground-breaking resolution endorsing the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), a roadmap to achieve ambitious immunization goals, making this decade the “Decade of Vaccines.”