Diarrhoeal disease: current concepts and future challenges. Diarrhoeal disease and vaccine development

Vaccination against diarrhoeal disease offers many opportunities to reduce significantly disease burden and childhood mortality from preventable disease world-wide. Regrettably, vaccine development has become an issue more of the development of the ultimate vaccine rather than the provision of a useful public health tool. The delay in implementing the delivery of vaccines with only 50% protective efficacy while awaiting the development of single dose vaccines that will provide lifelong immunity in more than 90% of recipients has resulted in no vaccine becoming available to those people who need it. Any alleviation of the disease burden would be of considerable benefit in an endemic region, to both the people and the governments, while researchers continue pursuing the ideal vaccine. The issues are discussed in this paper.