Streptococcus pneumoniae, pneumococcus, causes a number of different clinical syndromes including invasive diseases like meningitis and sepsis/bacteraemia, pneumonia and upper respiratory infections like otitis media in children and sinusitis in adults. The disease burden is highest among infants and the elderly. Pneumococcus remains the number one killer in developing countries, especially due to the high disease burden of pneumonia, but mortality in highly developed countries has reduced to low levels although pneumonia remains the most common cause of infectious diseases death.

The FinIP vaccine trial was a nation-wide phase III/IV cluster-randomised, double-blind field trial conducted in 2009–2012 by the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in collaboration with municipal health care centres and their local well-baby clinics and GSK as trial sponsor.

Read the article as published in ScienceDirect in March 2018.