Funds Raised in Harry's Memory and Progress on Vaccines

 
TOTAL FUNDS RAISED

The total funds raised in memory of Harry are as follows (all on-line and off-line donations) :
Meningitis Trust £2871.50
Meningitis Research Foundation £91,419.06
Youth Sports Trust £6748.67
Total £101,039.23

Many thanks from the Mills family for all your efforts. This is a fantastic sum of money that is still growing. A wonderful tribute to Harry's memory.

MENINIGITIS VACCINES

Harry died of infection from a strain of the Meningitis B virus and septicaemia. The difficulty with finding a vaccine for MenB is that many strains exist and the immune system does not recognise it as a threat.

We have attempted to provide an update on vaccines and further information and guidance on progress. Should you have any questions or need further information please email to richardm@flexit-resources.co.uk.

Linda Glennie, Head of Research and Medical Information, Meningitis Research Foundation, has provided the following update for Harry's Fund Raisers..
"Menveo (licensed by Novartis) has just received its European Licence today, so suddenly it’s news again.

Menveo could be quite significant, but unfortunately it doesn’t cover meningococcal B.
It does cover meningococcal A, C, W135 and Y. It’s the same technology as the MenC vaccine so we all expect it to work very well. For now it will probably be used in the UK for travellers to places with high incidence of MenA or MenW135 like Africa and Saudi Arabia, for people with particular immunodeficiencies that make infection with MenY or MenW135 more likely, or people who are household contacts of someone who is ill with one of these strains.

However, a bigger question is whether the UK should use Menveo routinely. Many people think that in order to maintain immunity to MenC, we will need a teenage booster introduced in the near future. Instead of using MenC for that, we could use Menveo. The number of cases of Men A,Y and W135 in the UK is quite low—just over 70 cases in 2008, more in 2009 but the figures aren’t published yet. Some people think these numbers are too low to warrant using Menveo. However, if you can save 70 people from potential death or disability just by switching one vaccine for another, we think there’s a pretty strong case actually. Also, a teenage booster would catch people at the age when they are most likely to go off travelling to places that may well have higher risk of these strains even if they aren’t on an official list of high risk destinations. The US for example has quite high numbers of MenY cases.

Also, it looks like cases of MenY are starting to go up—still very low, but the rate of increase is starting to make people take notice. In the US, they went from having almost no MenY cases to MenY accounting for around a third of all meningo cases within a very few years.

At the moment Menveo is licensed for ages 11 to 55. However, there is very good evidence that it protects in younger children, so a licence for babies and children may not be too far away. Once that happens, the vaccine could be used more widely."

See the following for further information (click on each):-
 
Menova
  
MRF ‘Ask the expert’ on teenage booster and Menveo
 
Why does MRF still fund MenB research?
 
MRF Site Visit to Imperial when we looked at 2 MRF funded MenB vaccine projects
 
MRF Annual Review