ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings "Solutions" segment of June 5, 1997 featured the research of ASPP Education Foundation Board Member Charles Arntzen in engineering bananas for use as vaccines against human diseases such as cholera and hepatitis. The three-and-one-half-minute televised segment is a very favorable report on the advantages Arntzen's research offers in providing more children more affordable vaccines that are administered more easily with less pain to the patients.

Peter Jennings introduced the segment on vaccinations and the banana by pointing out that three million people die in a year from common diseases like diphtheria, cholera and hepatitis because they are not being vaccinated. Jennings explained that the problem is that many vaccines are expensive, moreover, a number of them have to be refrigerated, "But there are some solutions out there, and here is ABC's Jack Smith." The segment filmed, at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, New York, explained that children now face 15 vaccinations for 10 diseases with another 50 vaccinations for another 30 diseases in the works.

Several painful looking injections of vaccines into children were shown with children crying. A solution to this problem would be to provide an oral vaccine made possible through Arntzen's pioneering genetic research with the banana, Smith reported. He pointed out that the banana-based vaccine could also be provided at less cost to children around the world.

Jennings concluded the segment with the comment that the same technique could lead to a safer food supply. Researchers in the U.S. and Canada are testing vaccines that can be put in corn and soybeans to feed to animals, Jennings said.