Sticker may save children’s lives

Press, 7 March 1983, Page 30

Sticker may save children’s lives

NZPA-Reuter Ottawa i 1 Hundreds of thousands of 1 children in developing coun- i tries, swept away by measles each year after being given < spoilt vaccines, can now be < saved by a little red sticker, researchers say. < The life-saving sticker, < perfected in North American ’ laboratories and being field- t tested from China to Argen- i tina, changes colour to show health workers if a phial of i vaccine has lost its potency I in the sweltering heat of the < tropics. 1 Researchers hope their success with the measles t vaccine sticker will lead to 1 indicators for use on other < vaccines, including one for i polio. ' About $200,000 in funding i for the project came from Canada's International De- i velopment Research Centre, where a spokeswoman, Lourdes Flor, dramatically < summarised the problem: 1 “Malnutrition plus measles ' equals murder. This combina- i tion is killing hundreds of thousands of children every t year.” 1 The World Health Organisation has launched an inter- : national immunisation pro- | gramme to combat the killer l combination of poverty and disease. However, it recognises that the biggest stumbling blocks are not medical or technical, < but the practical difficulty of getting vaccines safely and effectively from factory to child. Mrs Flor highlighted what a tragedy it was to see mothers in developing countries bring in their children to be vaccinated against

measles, only to see them die later from a fatal combination of the disease and malnutrition. “You are misusing people’s confidence. It is counter-pro-ductive." she said. The trouble is that vaccines. often transported to distant villages by health workers in the back of a. swelteringly hot car. are fragile life-savers. Tests have shown they are useless if kept in 37 deg. heat for more than a week. Without adequate and careful refrigeration, the vaccine dies. So researchers need a speedy and simple way of telling the health worker, often blessed with only rudimentary knowledge of medicine, whether a vaccine is still valid. That is where the little red sticker comes in. Devised by Allied Chemicals in the United States, it involves a chemically treated sticker that is stuck to the top of the vaccine bottle and changes colour if it is going off. When Allied Chemicals decided it was not viable to produce the time-tempera-ture indicator on a mass scale, the Seattle-based nonprofit organisation, PATH (Programme for Appropriate Tecnology in Health) stepped in. Dr Patrick Tam, a PATH bio-engineer responsible for co-ordinating development of the little red sticker, said: “We took over and developed the prototype and it is now being tested in the field. The first results we have received from the Philippines are encouraging. “It was also tried out in Mexico and Indonesia to see

if health workers understood how the system worked. ” The next stage is a series of exhaustive field tests that will put the sticker on trial in China, Pakistan, Kenya. Argentina. Nepal. Peru, and Zimbabwe over the next six to eight months. "Funding has come from the World Health Organisation as well as Oxfam in Britain, Canada's contribution, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York. Dr Tam said, "It will take several years to have, it in full use. We have to overcome the inertia of the system. You need to train health workers to understand the concept." The stickers can be put on the vaccines either on the production line or after a shipment arrives. The project has proved to be a fine example of international co-operation between private and public enterprise so that millions of children around the world can benefit. Highlighting the enormity of the problem and the urgency of a solution, Dr Tam said, “There is no way of knowing how many vaccines have lost their potency. We are now hoping to develop indicators for other vaccines. The next one in line is polio."