In 2000, when physician Julie Jacobson visited Kurnool in southern India, hospital wards were overflowing with children. The culprit: Japanese encephalitis, a mosquito-borne virus that causes paralysis, seizures, and death. The disease has killed more than 3 million children worldwide over the last 60 years. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” Jacobson says, “kids in comas, seizing, two or three per bed.”
Jacobson now manages projects that prevent neglected tropical diseases like Japanese encephalitis at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2003 donated more than $35 million to the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) to fight the virus. A price of $13.50 for a three-dose regimen put conventional vaccines out of reach for many patients. PATH found a Chinese company that had created a single-dose vaccine and worked with the firm to reduce the cost to about 25 cents. By this year 61 million children had been vaccinated in India alone; an additional 3 million were immunized in other affected countries. “That’s real progress for a disease that didn’t have a name 10 years ago,” Jacobson says.
