| Summary: | In March 1994, the newly formed IOM Steering Committee on the Children's Vaccine Initiative: Continuing Activities met for the first time. The panel was charged with overseeing the planning of these two workshops. With input from USAID, the committee decided that the first session should address impediments to the introduction in the developing world of new vaccines against acute respiratory infections (ARI). The USAID hoped the workshop would help inform its own program development as well as the activities of other players in this arena. To ensure that the broadest range of issues was considered, the committee decided the workshop should look at existing products that are at different stages of development. With this in mind, the panel selected three types of vaccines for discussion. Conjugate vaccine against Haemophilus influenzae b (Hib) represented a vaccine that is already widely used. Conjugate vaccine against Streptococcus pneumoniae was illustrative of a product still undergoing extensive development. The committee also chose to include conjugate vaccine against Neisseria meningitides. For the second workshop; the panel hoped the meeting would stimulate additional useful dialogue about the CVI between the public and private sectors. In particular, the committee wanted to focus attention on how the U.S vaccine and biotechnology industries may best contribute to meeting the needs of developing countries for new and improved vaccines. To increase the likelihood that participants would speak freely, the meeting was by invitation only and was held at a secluded site in rural Virginia. Because of the somewhat sensitive nature of the topics discussed, this Summary, unlike the one from the September workshop, does not identify participants by name
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