Events

13 Sep 2018

New challenges and opportunities in child and adolescent vaccination

At this seminar, Professor Kristine Macartney from the School of Medicine, University of Sydney, will talk on New challenges and opportunities in child and adolescent vaccination.

Worldwide, more people than ever have been prevented from dying or suffering morbidity from infectious disease through cost-effective child and adolescent vaccination programs. Yet, a range of challenges persist. These include: improving access to basic vaccines for an estimated 20 million children (predominantly in low and middle-income countries); ensuring affordable new vaccines are developed and can reach those in greatest need; strengthening healthcare systems to introduce and sustain more (and sometimes competing) vaccines into crowded schedules; and combatting vaccine safety concerns and ‘fake news’. Opportunities include development of new vaccines, including those given in pregnancy to prevent disease in early infancy, such as from RSV and group B streptococcal infection and increasing use of vaccination in early adolescence (eg against HPV and meningococcus). Changes to vaccine development are being underpinned by rapid advances in immunology but must be matched by multi-disciplinary research to ensure new vaccines can be delivered to vulnerable populations to maximise disease prevention.

Professor Kristine Macartney is a paediatrician specialising in infectious diseases. She is a medical graduate of the University of New South Wales and undertook her specialty training in Sydney and in the United States at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her Doctorate of Medicine was on rotavirus infection, in particular the mucosal immune response to novel vaccine candidates. She was a founding member of the Vaccine Education Centre at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She is currently Director at the National Centre for Immunisation Research & Surveillance, a paediatric infectious disease consultant at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead and an Professor in the Discipline of Paediatrics and Child Health, University of Sydney. Her research interests include translation of evidence into policy and practice, vaccine safety, and most other areas of vaccine preventable diseases research, particularly in relation to rotavirus, varicella zoster virus and influenza. She is the senior editor of the Australian Immunisation Handbook (9th Edition, 2008 and 10th Edition, 2013) and has authored many peer-reviewed publications. She is a former member of the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicines and a current member of the Advisory Committee on Vaccines of the Therapeutic Goods Administration.