Vaccines as instruments of foreign policy

Abstract

Nearly a century ago, in 1913, the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City almost single‐handedly created American tropical medicine research. Through a focused programme of philanthropic support for research on the treatment and prevention of infections such as malaria, yellow fever and hookworm, they initiated efforts to fight those diseases that affect the world's poorest nations. Simultaneous funding for The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, new institutions of public health at Johns Hopkins and Harvard University, and overseas research and educational institutions in Brazil and China further created an infrastructure by which American tropical disease research and development was supported and sustained. > The dwindling resources for developing world health in the context of a booming stock market and economic growth and prosperity threatened to tarnish the 1990s as a decade of moral outrage The development of the yellow fever vaccine and the eradication of malaria in many parts of the world are among the many achievements that resulted from the Rockefeller initiative. But the last two decades have witnessed a decrease in clinical and laboratory tropical disease research. During this period, the Rockefeller Foundation gradually moved away from funding biomedical research and left this task to organisations without experience in tropical disease research, such as the MacArthur Foundation. Unfortunately, these foundations were not prepared or committed to support work in this difficult field in the long term. Moreover, both the Tropical Disease Research programme of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international programmes of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) suffered from chronic under‐funding. Thus, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, American scientists began leaving research on tropical diseases at an alarming rate. This scientific exodus occurred at a time when 2 million children were dying each year from malaria, when children's …