Technologies that make administration of vaccines safer

There is an ever-expanding technology that is aimed at making the administration of vaccines safer. Conventional ways of administering vaccines are being upgraded, modified or replaced by a wide variety of innovations. The paradigm of liquid vaccines, needles and syringes is slow to change, but already developments are ocurring that will change for ever the way vaccines are administered and will improve the safety record of immunization. The oral route of vaccine administration has generally been thought of as safe, but until now only the polio vaccine has been widely used in this way. The conventional method of vaccine administration is by injection. Many ingenious devices have become available that now make injecting safer. Inventors are now looking imaginatively to alternative routes and technologies for delivering vaccines. Vaccines are genreally manufactured to extremely high standards and rarely are shown to be the cause of safety issues. People remain the weakest safety link is vaccine administration. Technologies that bypasses the ability of man to make bad decisions or to behave incorrectly are of tremendous value. The vaccine world is in the middle of a radical re-think about how vaccines might best be administered. The presentation of the vaccine can be altered to fit new technologies such as powder jet guns, or skin patches. Even the conventional needle and syringe have evolved to much safer versions, and are set to continue this evolution. All this means even safer vaccines and their delivery. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.