Explore the vast range of titles available.

Vaccination is the most effective medical intervention ever introduced and, together with clean water and sanitation, it has eliminated a large part of the infectious diseases that once killed millions of people. A recent study concluded that since 1924 in the United States alone, vaccines have prevented 40 million cases of diphtheria, 35 million cases of measles, and a total of 103 million cases of childhood diseases. A report from the World Health Organization states that today vaccines prevent 2.5 million deaths per year: Every minute five lives are saved by vaccines worldwide. Overall, vaccines have done and continue to do an excellent job in eliminating or reducing the impact of childhood diseases. Furthermore, thanks to new technologies, vaccines now have the potential to make an enormous contribution to the health of modern society by preventing and treating not only communicable diseases in all ages, but also noncommunicable diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. The achievement of these results requires the development of novel technologies and health economic models able to capture not only the mere cost–benefit of vaccination, but also the value of health per se.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a shocking reminder of how our world would look in the absence of vaccination. Fortunately, new technologies, the pace of understanding new and existing pathogens, and the increased knowledge of the immune system allow us today to develop vaccines at an unprecedented speed. Some of the vaccine technologies that are fast-tracked by the urgency of COVID-19 may also be the answer for other health priorities, such as antimicrobial resistance, chronic infections, and cancer, that the post-COVID-19 world will urgently need to face. This perspective analyzes the way COVID-19 is transforming vaccinology and the opportunities for vaccines to have an increasingly important role in health and well-being.

Reactogenicity represents the physical manifestation of the inflammatory response to vaccination, and can include injection-site pain, redness, swelling or induration at the injection site, as well as systemic symptoms, such as fever, myalgia, or headache. The experience of symptoms following vaccination can lead to needle fear, long-term negative attitudes and non-compliant behaviours, which undermine the public health impact of vaccination. This review presents current knowledge on the potential causes of reactogenicity, and how host characteristics, vaccine administration and composition factors can influence the development and perception of reactogenicity. The intent is to provide an overview of reactogenicity after vaccination to help the vaccine community, including healthcare professionals, in maintaining confidence in vaccines by promoting vaccination, setting expectations for vaccinees about what might occur after vaccination and reducing anxiety by managing the vaccination setting.

In the management of water distribution networks, large energy savings can be yielded by exploiting the head drop due to the network pressure control strategy, i.e., for leak reductions. Hydropower in small streams is already exploited, but technical solutions combining efficiency and economic convenience are still required. In water distribution networks, an additional design problem comes out from the necessity of ensuring a required head drop under variable operating conditions, i.e., head and discharge variations. Both a hydraulic regulation (HR)—via a series-parallel hydraulic circuit- and an electrical regulation (ER)—via inverter- are feasible solutions. A design procedure for the selection of a production device in a series-parallel hydraulic circuit has been recently proposed. The procedure, named VOS (Variable Operating Strategy), is based on the overall plant efficiency criteria and is applied to a water distribution network where a PAT (pump as a turbine) is used in order to produce energy. In the present paper the VOS design procedure has been extended to the electrical regulation and a comparison between HR and ER efficiency and flexibility within a water distribution network is shown: HR was found more flexible than ER and more efficient. Finally a preliminary economic study has been carried out in order to show the viability of both systems, and a shorter payback period of the electromechanical equipment was found for HR mode.

The primary goal of vaccination is the prevention of pathogen-specific infection. The indirect consequences may include maintenance of homeostasis through prevention of infection-induced complications; trained immunity that re-programs innate cells to respond more efficiently to later, unrelated threats; slowing or reversing immune senescence by altering the epigenetic clock, and leveraging the pool of memory B and T cells to improve responses to new infections. Vaccines may exploit the plasticity of the immune system to drive longer-term immune responses that promote health at a broader level than just the prevention of single, specific infections. In this perspective, we discuss the concept of “immune fitness” and how to potentially build a resilient immune system that could contribute to better health. We argue that vaccines may contribute positively to immune fitness in ways that are only beginning to be understood, and that life-course vaccination is a fundamental tool for achieving healthy aging.

In an open label clinical study (2007), MF59-adjuvanted hemagglutinin (HA) vaccine from H5N1-A/Vietnam/1194/2004 (clade 1) was administered to subjects previously vaccinated (primed) with clade 0 H5N3 (A/duck/Singapore/97) vaccine at least 6 years earlier (in 1999 or 2001). The primed individuals responded rapidly and generated high neutralizing antibody titers against the H5N1-Vietnam strain within 7 days of a single booster vaccination. Furthermore, significant cross-neutralization titers were measured against H5N1 clade 0, 1, and 2 viruses. In the current study, the impact of MF59 adjuvant during heterologous priming on the quality of humoral polyclonal immune response in different vaccine arms were further evaluated using real time kinetics assay by surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Total anti-H5N1 HA1 polyclonal sera antibody binding from the heterologous prime-boost groups after a single MF59-H5N1 boost was significantly higher compared with sera from unprimed individuals that received two MF59-H5N1 vaccinations. The antigen-antibody complex dissociation rates (surrogate for antibody affinity) of the polyclonal sera against HA1 of H5N1-A/Vietnam/1194/2004 from the MF59-H5N3 primed groups were significantly higher compared to sera from unadjuvanted primed groups or unprimed individuals that received two MF59-H5N1 vaccines. Furthermore, strong inverse correlations were observed between the antibody dissociation off-rates of the immune sera against HA1 (but not HA2) and the virus neutralization titers against H5 vaccine strains and heterologous H5N1 strains. These findings supports the use of oil-in-water-adjuvanted pandemic influenza vaccines to elicit long term memory B cells with high affinity BCR capable of responding to potential variant pandemic viruses likely to emerge and adapt to human transmissions.

Systems vaccinology approaches have been used successfully to define early signatures of the vaccine-induced immune response. However, the possibility that transcriptomics can also identify a correlate or surrogate for vaccine inflammation has not been fully explored. We have compared four licensed vaccines with known safety profiles, as well as three agonists of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) with known inflammatory potential, to elucidate the transcriptomic profile of an acceptable response to vaccination versus that of an inflammatory reaction. In mice, we looked at the transcriptomic changes in muscle at the injection site, the lymph node that drained the muscle, and the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs)isolated from the circulating blood from 4 hr after injection and over the next week. A detailed examination and comparative analysis of these transcriptomes revealed a set of novel biomarkers that are reflective of inflammation after vaccination. These biomarkers are readily measurable in the peripheral blood, providing useful surrogates of inflammation, and provide a way to select candidates with acceptable safety profiles. Measles, whooping cough and other diseases can cause serious illness and death in humans, especially in young children and other vulnerable individuals. Giving people vaccines ‘trains’ their immune system to recognize and fight the microbes that cause the conditions. During an infection, the immune system triggers a set of responses that limit the spread of the infectious agent and eliminate it from the body. This can include swelling of tissues (known as inflammation), which in rare cases, can be life threatening. Inoculations work by sparking a mild immune response in the body. Before a new vaccine is licensed for use, it is thoroughly tested in mice and rodents, and then in human volunteers, to ensure it will cause little or no inflammation. Finding a way to predict early on whether a vaccine candidate will trigger dangerous levels of inflammation would improve this process. To explore this, McKay, Cizmeci et al. injected the muscle tissue of different groups of mice with one of four licensed vaccines which, by definition, cause little or no inflammation. Other groups of animals were given one of three drugs known to trigger inflammation. Over the following seven days the team repeatedly collected blood as well as cells from the muscle tissue and the lymph nodes. These samples were then analysed to find out which genes were switched on or off at any given time. The experiments show that the responses of genes in the blood and lymph cells of the mice are connected to those in the muscle cells. Therefore, blood samples may provide a quick and convenient way to assess how an animal is responding to a potential new vaccine. By comparing the genes switched on or off in response to the different vaccines and drugs, McKay, Cizemeci et al. were able to identify a set of genes (known as “biomarkers”) that are associated with inflammation in animals. These biomarkers can be used to spot early on whether a new treatment is triggering inflammation. The next step would then be to identify a similar or identical set of biomarkers in other animals used in vaccine research, and in humans. Ultimately, this approach could make the assessment of the safety of a new vaccine candidate easier.

Water distribution networks face several problems related to leakages, where the pressure control strategy is a common practice for water loss management. Small-scale hydropower schemes, where pumps as turbines replace pressure reducing valves, can be considered an interesting technical solution, which ensures both economic convenience and system flexibility. Due to the water networks’ variable operating conditions, a new methodology to model the effectiveness of pumps as turbines was developed based on the efficiency and the mechanical reliability of the hydropower device and the flexibility of the plant. System effectiveness is proposed as the objective function in the optimization procedure and applied to a real system, enabling one to emphasize that the hydraulic regulation mode of the plant is better than the electric regulation mode for American Petroleum Industry (API) manufacturing standards of pumps.

The Molise region (southern Italy) fronts the Adriatic Sea for nearly 36 km and has been suffering from erosion since the mid-20th century. In this article, an in-depth analysis has been conducted in the time-frame 2004–2016, with the purpose of discussing the most recent shoreline evolution trends and individuating the climate forcings that best correlate with them. The results of the study show that an intense erosion process took place between 2011 and 2016, both at the northern and southern parts of the coast. This shoreline retreat is at a large extent a downdrift effect of hard protection systems. Both the direct observation of the coast and numerical simulations, performed with the software GENESIS, indicate that the shoreline response is significantly influenced by wave attacks from approximately 10° N; however, the bimodality that characterizes the Molise coast wave climate may have played an important role in the beach dynamics, especially where structural systems alternate to unprotected shore segments.

Staphylococcus aureus is a common human commensal and the leading cause of diverse infections. To identify distinctive parameters associated with infection and colonization, we compared the immune and inflammatory responses of patients with a diagnosis of invasive S. aureus disease to healthy donors. We analyzed the inflammatory responses founding a pattern of distinctive cytokines significantly higher in the patients with invasive disease. The measure of antibody levels revealed a wide antibody responsiveness from all subjects to most of the antigens, with significantly higher response for some antigens in the invasive patients compared to control. Moreover, functional antibodies against toxins distinctively associated with the invasive disease. Finally, we examined the genomic variability of isolates, showing no major differences in genetic distribution compared to a panel of representative strains. Overall, our study shows specific signatures of cytokines and functional antibodies in patients with different primary invasive diseases caused by S. aureus . These data provide insight into human responses towards invasive staphylococcal infections and are important for guiding the identification of novel preventive and therapeutic interventions against S. aureus .