US scientists have devised a new way of storing and delivering
vulnerable antibiotics and vaccines, with a little help from the
silk moth. Infectious diseases kill millions of children every
year, and continue to do so in the developing world more than
two decades after the World Health Organisation, Unicef and
charities such as Rotary International launched a campaign to
eliminate polio and immunise every child against the six biggest
killers. Civil war, corruption, ignorance and poverty all
created problems, but one of the biggest is simply the fragile
nature of vaccines: they tend to deteriorate rapidly unless kept
in the refrigerator. This is a problem even for Britain's
National Health Service. It is a much bigger problem in hot,
humid regions without clinics, electricity or clean water –
those regions where children are most at risk from mumps,
measles and rubella, from gastric infections and pulmonary
diseases, and where the wild polio virus still presents a
threat. Two researchers from Massachusetts r