Christine Stabell Benn, MD, PhD, DMSc, MAE, has worked at the Bandim Health Project
in Guinea-Bissau (BHP, www.bandim.org) since 1993. Dr. Benn holds a position as
Professor in Global Health at University of Southern Denmark.
Her 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, GuineaBissau, she has observed that vaccines affect overall health to a much larger extent than
explained by their specific effects. In addition to their well-known specific effects, they
have so-called “non-specific effects”, which may be at least as important as their specific
effects. Intriguingly, these effects are often sex-differential.
Her 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 many trials
testing the overall health effects of vitamin A supplementation, BCG vaccine, oral polio
vaccine and early measles vaccine.
She also bridged to immunology and explored the biological mechanisms underlying the
non-specific effects of vitamin A and vaccines.
She has taken the observations back to Denmark, to test in randomised trials and
observational studies whether non-specific effects of vaccines are important in highincome settings as well.
Most recently, she is testing whether non-specific effects of BCG vaccine and oral polio
vaccine can provide partial protection against COVID-19.