Fall in childhood vaccination exposes the world to more epidemic outbreaks

the fall of the child vaccination in a hundred countries, due to the emergency situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19now exposes the world to epidemic outbreaks of easily preventable diseases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today, which has joined other entities to try to reverse this situation.

Between 2019 and 2021, 67 million children did not receive a full vaccination, including 48 million children who have been called “zero dose” because they did not even receive a dose of basic vaccines, including diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP), according to data collected from UNICEF’s world report on the state of the world’s children.

In presenting the international campaign “The Great Update” of vaccines, the WHO specified that only in 2021 more than 25 million children lacked at least one vaccine, which explains the multiplication of outbreaks of infectious diseases, even in regions of the world where some of these were considered eradicated.

The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said today that this represents “a historic setback in childhood immunization” and means that vaccination coverage has gone from 86% to 81% in the reference period.

MSF, which provides relief in countries experiencing the worst humanitarian crises, stressed that 11 million children with insufficient or no vaccinations live in very fragile humanitarian settings, including armed conflicts.

For this reason, he asked the GAVI alliance, which promotes access to vaccines in poor countries, “to waive the country co-financing requirement” to be able to participate in the campaign of the “Great Update”.

GAVI, the WHO, Unicef, the Alliance for Vaccines and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are the main promoters of the campaign, which will focus its efforts and resources on some twenty countries where 75% of children are partially vaccinated or not vaccinated, starting with the Africans.

To do this, countries will have to adapt their vaccination policies, admitting a smaller number of doses if necessary -depending on the time elapsed since the recommended vaccination age- or modifying the intervals.

The WHO also proposes using health care centers to identify children who need to be vaccinated (when they go to them for other reasons) and will insist that a multidose vial of vaccine must be opened even if there is only one child to vaccinate .

In some countries, health personnel are instructed not to open a vial in such cases to avoid waste, but the organization believes that the paramount interest is to protect each child and reminds that basic vaccines are often cheap.

The WHO director of immunization, Kate O’Brien, said today that among the pathogens most likely to cause epidemic outbreaks due to low vaccination coverage is, for example, the measles virus, a highly contagious disease, and among which 12 and 18 people can be infected for each case.

In the last year there have been major outbreaks of measles in 33 countries, fourteen more than in the previous period.

There are also outbreaks of yellow fever – ten in Africa and one in Latin America – caused by a virus that is particularly dangerous when circulating in urban settings, but can be prevented with a vaccine.

O’Brien also mentioned the reduction in immunization against the human papilloma virus – the main cause of cervical cancer – among girls and boys between 9 and 14 years of age. Before the pandemic, coverage had reached 20% in this age category, but it has now fallen to 15%.

The main reason is that during the most acute stage of the pandemic, schools were closed, which was where this vaccine was made available to adolescents in most countries where it is available.

Source: EFE