- As the developer of some of the world’s important vaccines, Merck has a responsibility to prevent disease and help save lives through vaccination. Merck is committed to reducing the gap between vaccine availability in developed countries and their introduction in the developing world.
- Every day, more than 300,000 infants and children around the world are infected with rotavirus, and nearly 1,500 women around the world are diagnosed with cervical cancer. Merck is implementing a plan, based on innovation, partnerships, pricing and implementation, to improve access to its vaccines in the developing world where they are needed most.
- As we move towards 2010, Merck is looking forward to working with international groups such as the GAVI Alliance, WHO, PATH, UNICEF, PAHO and others to facilitate introduction of our rotavirus and human papillomavirus vaccines in the world's poorest countries.
Future Challenges
To ensure that vaccine research continues, more positive actions are necessary, including increased societal recognition of the value of vaccines, improvements to the infrastructure for delivering vaccines in the developed and developing world, and fostering sustainable markets for new vaccines. The value and importance of vaccines to public health need to be recognized by society or the incentives to companies and even researchers will erode. This would be tragic, considering the increasing possibilities of finding new ways to prevent disease, boosted by new technologies such as recombinant DNA and gene mapping. These advances have increased the tools available to vaccine developers and have led directly to the development of many of the newer vaccines that are either already significantly reducing diseases or have the potential significantly to reduce diseases such as meningitis, diarrhea, pneumonia and cervical cancer.
The content on this page was last modified on September 15, 2009.
Merck & Co., Inc., Whitehouse Station, NJ, USA, and Schering-Plough Corporation, Kenilworth, NJ, USA, are now one company. We have combined our global operations under the name Merck & Co., Inc. We are working to update our corporate responsibility Web site to reflect our new, combined, global organization.
