Christine Stabell Benn

I am a medical doctor, head of the Bandim Health Project, and a professor in Global Health at Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark.

My research focuses on health interventions and their effect on overall health in real life. Based to a large extent on work done in one of the world’s poorest countries, Guinea-Bissau, we have observed that that vaccines and vitamins affect the immune system in much more general ways than previously thought. These health interventions also interact, and intriguingly, these interactions are often sex-differential.

My main contribution has been to take the observations on non-specific effects of vaccines and vitamins forward to randomised controlled trials, being the PI for several recent trials testing the overall health effects of vitamin A supplementation, BCG vaccine, oral polio vaccine and early measles vaccine.

I have also bridged to immunology, and explored the biological mechanisms underlying the non-specific effects of both vitamin A and vaccines.

Lastly, we have taken the observations back to Denmark, to test in randomised trials and observational studies whether non-specific effects of vaccines are important in high-income settings as well.

Many people ask me for personal advice reg. vaccines; unfortuantely I do not have the time to provide such advice.