In the West African country of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, an 18-year-old boy is killed in the road. Why? A case of meningitis. The meningitis epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa spurred a global race to find a vaccine, led by the founding of the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP). This network of doctors, vaccine developers, public health officials, and UN workers converged to develop an inexpensive vaccine – without Big Pharma. Instead, they built teams as an ecosystem of thriving partnerships. In this episode of Teamistry, we hear from the original MVP team and how they persevered despite enormous challenges. Dr. Samba Sow, Director General of the Centre for Vaccine Development in Mali, Dr. Suresh Jhadav, Executive Director of the Serum Institute of India and Dr. Marc LaForce, then Director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project. We also hear from Dr. Ngozi Erondu, an infectious disease specialist who explains MVP's legacy in building "South-South" collaborations, and Dr. Mark Alderson, project leader at PATH, describes how the team brought the vaccine from labs in one part of the globe to clinics in another. Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.
The story of the meningitis vaccine project begins in many ways in the west african country of Burkina Faso and an 18 year old named Jean Francois.
He was the apple of everyone's eye.
He was a captain of the local soccer team.
He was a wonderful student who won the mathematics medal.
And he had what seemed to be an impeccable future.
Then one evening, after doing his studies, went to bed and somewhere around one or two in the morning, woke up with a terrible headache.
That's doctor Mark Laforce, who was stationed in Burkina Faso in the nineties working on large scale immunization projects.
At that time, an epidemic of meningitis a, a highly contagious and often deadly bacterial infection was sweeping through the region.
Jean Francois, delirious and running a high fever, is rushed to a doctor by his mother.
Tests are done, and the diagnosis is confirmed.
It's meningitis.
Even if he survives, young, healthy patients like Jean Francois can walk away from the disease with lifelong side effects.
He didn't die, but he lost his hearing.
This is doctor Suresh Jadov, executive director of the Serum Institute of India.
And four or five years later, while playing with his siblings and friends, Ball went on the road and there was a car which was coming from behind who was honking, but this boy could not hear it and met with an accident and lost his life.
It's a tragic, senseless loss.
Years later, when doctor La force visits the serum institute in India to try and recruit them to a project to develop a vaccine for meningitis a he tells the story of Jean Francois to doctor Zhatov.
He said, this is something which has moved me.
And that story also moved me.
The meningitis outbreak of the late nineties affects something in the range of 250,000 people in sub saharan Africa.