Tomorrow's vaccines : responding to emerging issues, new technologies and personalization

Along with antibiotics, vaccination was the greatest success of modern medicine in the 20th^century , and remains one of the pillars of public health in the field of communicable infectious diseases. A certain mistrust is emerging, due to a number of factors, including the loss of perception of the societal weight of infectious diseases, precisely because of their control by vaccines. Vaccination has thus become a sociological subject, after having been essentially a medical-scientific one. In this potentially deleterious situation for public health, there is an urgent need to strengthen knowledge of vaccines and understanding of their role in global health, both in industrialized countries and in low-income countries where vaccination coverage remains inadequate.

The seminar highlighted the contribution vaccines have made to date in controlling or even eradicating communicable diseases such as smallpox and most serious infections of early childhood. Above all, it showed the extent to which the new generations of vaccines have progressed in terms of efficacy, tolerance and spectrum of targeted diseases.