One fateful day in the West African country of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, an 18-year-old boy was killed in the road. Jean-François had been on the cusp of a promising future, with a medal in mathematics and the captaincy of his school soccer team. What happened? A case of meningitis.
Though the disease had spared his life, it had compromised it in other ways: he wasn’t able to hear the car that took his life. In this episode of Teamistry, host Gabriela Cowperthwaite looks at the story of Jean-François and those of thousands of children who suffered from this highly contagious and lethal bacterial infection. The meningitis epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa spurred a global race to find a vaccine, led by the founding of the Meningitis Vaccine Project. This network of doctors, vaccine developers, public health officials, and UN workers from four continents – Africa, North America, Asia and Europe – converged for a shared mission: to develop a vaccine within a decade. But not only that, something more unthinkable. They would develop and administer millions of inexpensive doses – without Big Pharma. The Meningitis Vaccine Project built teams as an ecosystem of thriving partnerships, and scaled up without ever losing sight of individual needs or the hearts of local communities. 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 Institute 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 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.
