Gianluca Breghi from the Fondazione Achille Sclavo ETS, Siena, Italy will be presenting at the Vaccines for Enteric Disease (VED) 2025 conference, held at the Wallenberg Conference Centre, Gothenburg, Sweden from June 24-26, 2025.
Gianluca will deliver an oral presentation on ‘A rapid diagnostic test to be used for diagnosis of invasive non-typhoidal salmonellosis’. This innovative research promises to make significant strides in the field of infectious diseases.
This presentation wants to bring to the attention of the scientific and institutional communities the needs expressed by our African clinical colleagues of an appropriate tool to manage a disease still neglected, despite advancements in vaccine R&D. The need for a Point-of-care (p.o.c.) Rapid Diagnostic Test (RDT) has been present in literature for some time and regularly emerged at WHO Expert meetings. Today diagnosis at triage is mainly based on general clinical danger signs, and deaths ascribed to pre-existing comorbidities mask real disease impact. Diagnosis is problematic also due to cumbersome techniques (lumbar puncture aspirate) or non-specific p.o.c. handheld devices such as respiratory counters etc., not always adapted to rural areas of LICs handled by frontline healthcare workers limited training. Non-typhoidal Salmonella serovars’ impact, considering asymptomatic NTS + dNTS + iNTS, were estimated to cause over 500,000 cases of invasive disease leading to more than 79,000 deaths in 2019, mostly in <5, especially in sSA (>50,000 deaths/yr), where the disease is rapidly fatal, with CFR in Kenya up to 28-35% within 48h. Clinical treatment is challenged by diagnostic uncertainty: non-targeted child-friendly antimicrobials, or undertreatment with non-affordable antimicrobials, insufficient antimicrobial susceptibility data, and supply, and lack of data on appropriate dose and optimal treatment duration. No iNTS antimicrobial use recommendation is present in the WHO Essential Medicines List and also due to all of this iNTS MDR and XDR strains are widely reported across sSA.
VED 2025 is a major opportunity to:
• Re-evaluate the diarrheal disease burden in both industrialized and developing worlds.
• Discuss which diseases require an immunization strategy and if eradication or control is achievable by a vaccine.
• Review the state-of-the-art vaccine candidates currently available.
• Address obstacles to obtaining institutional and industrial support for these vaccines.
• Examine studies conducted in developing countries.
• Share views on the lack of facilities for enteric vaccine trials.
• Discuss the distribution of vaccines and implementation policy in the developing world.
