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A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a vaccine is "an antigenic substance prepared from the causative agent of a disease or a synthetic substitute, used to provide immunity against one or several diseases''. A vaccine tries to stimulates our immune system to recognize certain types of bacteria and viruses by injecting a weakened or killed pathogen, such as a bacterium or virus, or of a portion of the pathogen's structure to our body but is incapable of causing severe infection.

Vaccines - Benefits and Risks is a reference book for the latest development and status of vaccine. It discusses vaccine effectiveness, toxicity and adverse effects. It takes a practical approach rather than a conceptual approach. It offers a truly reader-friendly way to get to this subject, making it the ideal resources for anyone who is new to this subject and providing a definitive guide to anyone in this vibrant and evolving discipline.

Chapter 1 elaborates importance of reliability of different measures in medicine. It covers examples of the reliability analysis of instruments commonly used in clinical application. Chapter 2 proposes three methods to estimate the causal infectiousness effect under a number of identification assumptions, and provide a sensitivity analysis method to assess how inferences would change under violation of one of the identification assumptions. The presented methods can simply be conducted by applying an existing SAS code. Chapter 3 proposes using Dendritic cells signatures to test Vaccine Formulations where system Immunology approaches that combine transcriptomics and other analytical techniques will enable the identification of biomarkers of vaccine efficacy. Chapter 4 examines the limited effect of current pneumococcal vaccines in protection against mucosal disease. An experimental human pneumococcal carriage model is proposed as a potential tool for mucosal vaccine development.

Chapter 5 reviews the latest information about bacterial OMVs (Outer Membrane Vesicles), which could be an alternative to develop safer and effective vaccines, and discusses findings on the nature of Brucella OMVs. Repeated exposure to Plasmodium falciparum malaria induces partial immunity, characterised by low grade infection without associated illness, but during pregnancy there is a striking recurrence of severe disease. Chapter 6 discusses the molecular interactions between parasite and placenta, the immune response that this triggers, and considers the prospects for a vaccine mimicking naturally-acquired immunity to pregnancy-associated malaria. Chapter 7 proposes a new tool consisting of a lentiviral vectors pseudotyped with the measles virus glycoproteins, H and F. This new tool allows monitoring of measles virus escape from neutralizing antibodies induced by MV infection or vaccination against measles. Chapter 8 summarizes the current knowledge about tumor immunology, mainly addressing the concept of immunosurveillance and tumor antigens, in addition to the relevant aspects of dendritic cells and the strategies for immunotherapy with these cells in lung cancer.

Chapter 9 discusses how to identify biomakers in tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is an old disease which continues to be a major global health problem. Identifying biomarkers which would be translated into a more accurate, inexpensive point-of-care tuberculosis tests that is applicable in indicating infection, disease, cure, reactivation or protection is very crucial for diagnosis, prognosis and developing new vaccines that help in achieving global tuberculosis control. Chapter 10 discusses BCG vaccine. BCG is currently the only available vaccine against tuberculosis. It protects against the most severe forms of the disease, military and meningeal tuberculosis; however, it is highly variable in its ability to protect against pulmonary tuberculosis.