Indonesia is rolling out a five-in-one vaccine that they plan to deliver in a single shot to every Indonesian child to protect them against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib).
The rollout is supported by the Australian Government through GAVI, the global vaccine alliance. The vaccine is manufactured by Bio Farma, who also hope to add rotavirus to the vaccines in the future.
Testing for flu, malarial drug resistance, and identifying the Bali bombers are all outcomes of an Australia-Indonesia medical research initiative that begun in 1997 and continues today.
The original Australia-Indonesia Medical Research Initiative agreement between the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne and the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta was conceived and funded by the Indonesian Minister of Research and Technology and the Australian Government, and designed to boost the capacity of the Indonesian labs while enabling more transfer of ideas and skills between the two countries.
Vaccines work best when they include an adjuvant, something that boosts your immune system’s reaction to the vaccine.
University of Melbourne researchers have recreated a fragment of a bacteria protein that activates white blood cells.
In 2012, they signed a research agreement with Bio Farma to help them turn their idea into a novel vaccine platform that could enhance vaccines for hepatitis, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, and other diseases.
Women in Indonesia were 21 times more likely to die from childbirth than women in Australia in 2015.
Many pregnant women in Indonesia, particularly in remote areas, do not regularly visit health clinics, and so complications are not detected and dealt with early enough.
Continue reading Detecting high risk pregnancies in Indonesia
A link between vitamin D deficiency and pneumonia is being investigated in two studies by Indonesian and Australian scientists in Indonesia.
They’re tracking the incidence and severity of respiratory tract infections in early childhood,including the common cold, asthma,pneumonia, and bronchiolitis, in hospitals and the community, in the hope of providing more information for treatment and management for respiratory diseases.
“Dengue has a significant impact on both Australia and Indonesia—the disease is hyper-endemic in Indonesia and affects the daily life of people living in the country,” says Dr Tedjo Sasmono of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta.
Their researchers have been working with The University of Queensland to create a new way to screen blood for dengue virus.
It’s the result of a joint-research project on dengue diagnostics, initiated in 2015 and funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant in collaboration with the Australian Red Cross Blood Service.
Scientists are bringing together the knowledge from 300 mental health experts in a multi-disciplinary project to reimagine the future of mental healthcare in Indonesia.
Conducting interviews about policy, key challenges, case studies and patient groups, they’re looking to understand how new practices can fit into the historical, sociological and anthropological aspects of psychiatry in Indonesia.
Bio Farma was established in 1890 and is a state-owned business that provides all the vaccines on Indonesia’s immunisation schedule. That’s 1.7 billion doses a year.
Bio Farma is also a major supplier to UN agencies and global health initiatives, producing, for example, 1.4 billion doses of polio vaccines of which about 20 million doses are for Indonesian use.
The company is based in Bandung about 100 km east of Jakarta.
Better vaccines are needed for the global fight against tuberculosis (TB) with nine million new cases annually. Indonesia had more than 320,000 reported cases in 2014, while Australia’s reported cases were just over 1,000. But the rise of drug-resistant TB poses a threat to all countries.
Two proteins from the tuberculosis bacterium have shown promising results in investigations for a new vaccine in mice. Scientists from Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, with colleagues from the Centenary Institute and the University of Sydney in Australia, have found that the injected proteins can prime the immune system to induce protection against TB in mice.
In 2014, residents of Yogyakarta started growing and releasing mosquitoes. It’s counter-intuitive, but the mosquitoes carry Wolbachia bacteria, which reduces the risk of them spreading dengue fever.
Over a number of weeks, mosquitoes with Wolbachia breed with local mosquitoes and pass the bacteria on to their offspring until almost all mosquitoes in the area carry the disease-blocking microbes.
