Post 01165e : Vaccine-preventable Diseases : Your Opinion

POST 01165E : VACCINE-PREVENTABLE DISEASES : YOUR OPINION 1st October 2007 __________________________________ Craig Shapiro from WHO requests your opinion. Documents are attached as they are rather small in size. The deadline is short by the end of this week, so you must react fast. __________________________________ NOTE: Feedback requested by Friday, October 5, 2007 Dear Colleagues: WHO is undertaking a project to categorize, by public health priority, diseases against which vaccines are currently available or may be available in the near-term. These are vaccines that are either: 1) currently licensed and available, but not yet recommended for universal routine use in national immunization programmes or 2) not currently available but expected to be licensed by the year 2012. The specific objective of the project is provide guidance to WHO member states and partners in defining priorities for decision-making with regards to the introduction of vaccines. To assist with the categorization, WHO is conducting an exercise using the method of paired comparison analysis. To that end, two lists are being circulated at this time for your input: 1) a list of diseases to be considered in the exercise, and 2) a list of criteria that could potentially be used to categorize diseases by public health priority. Please note at this time we are not asking you to categorize the diseases by public health priority, but rather to indicate if the universe of vaccines we are considering for the exercise is complete (i.e. the vaccines are listed and assigned to the correct columns). In addition, at this time we are asking your opinions regarding only disease-related criteria, since these criteria are most relevant to a global-level categorization exercise. Vaccine-related criteria (e.g. target product profile characteristics, etc.) will be considered in a subsequent activity, and other criteria such as programmatic and financial considerations (e.g. infrastructure capacity, affordability to countries, etc.) involve country-level decision making which is beyond the scope of this exercise. Please review the two attached lists and provide us with the following input: 1. Disease Listing: * Are there diseases being considered for this exercise that should be excluded (e.g., moved from column A to B)? (e.g., because a vaccine is not realistically expected to be licensed by 2012). * Are there diseases that have been excluded, but that should in fact be considered for this exercise (e.g., moved from column B to A)? * Are there some diseases not listed in either of the two columns, that should be reflected? * Other thoughts/input. 2. Criteria List: * Among disease-related criteria, please indicate and rank the "top 5" that you feel are most important in determining the public health priority of diseases for which vaccines are available in the near-term. If there are disease-related criteria that are missing, then please propose them and include in the ranking. We anticipate the review of these two lists should take no longer than 30 minutes of your time. Please send your feedback and criteria ranking by Friday, October 5, 2007. WHO will consolidate responses, subsequent to which a smaller group of stakeholders will be contacted for the pairwise comparison analysis. The results of the categorization will be distributed widely in a draft report for comment, and presented at the November 2007 meeting of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts. We very much appreciate your assistance with this activity, and look forward to your input. If you have any questions or comments, please send an e-mail to or contact me directly. Regards, Craig N. Shapiro, M.D. Medical Officer Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals Expanded Programme on Immunization World Health Organization Switzerland ______________________________________________________________________________ All members of the TechNet21 e-Forum are invited to send comments on any posting or to use the forum to raise a new discussion or request technical information in relation to immunization services. 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