For the past 3 years The Lancet's editors have singled out a Paper of the Year, which they consider to be the best piece of original medical research published in that year. The winning papers for 2006 were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (See notes to editors).
In a Comment to announce the winners, James Butcher, Executive Editor at The Lancet, states: "The editors were impressed by the efficacies of these two vaccines, which one day are likely to stand alongside smallpox, measles, and poliomyelitis vaccines in their global public health benefit. Rotavirus vaccination suffered a serious setback in 1999 after the withdrawal on safety grounds of RotaShield, but the trials conducted by Ruiz-Palacios and colleagues and Vesikari and colleagues make immunisation against this infection a practical reality again. We congratulate the investigators of those trials for doing what we consider to be the best medical research of the year."