As five African countries prepare to celebrate World Immunization Week (April 24-30) with the impending introduction of new vaccines, the GAVI Alliance is finalising plans to build on its successes with a major drive to increase access to vaccines and the impact of immunisation programmes by 2020.
This week, Angola and the Republic of Congo plan to begin protecting their children against severe diarrhoea with the rotavirus vaccine while Tanzania expects to begin a demonstration project to protect girls from the leading cause of cervical cancer with the human papillomavirus vaccine. Next week, Madagascar plans to also introduce rotavirus vaccine and Togo expects to undertake a dual launch of rotavirus and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines.
While these launches are taking place, the GAVI Alliance will be preparing for a key meeting to be held next month in Brussels, where the Alliance will set out the significantly increased impact that can be achieved by supporting immunisation programmes in the world’s poorest countries through to 2020.
European Commissioner for Development, Andris Piebalgs, will host the meeting on May 20 where GAVI Alliance will present to its partners the funding requirements needed during the five-year period from the beginning of 2016 to build upon the gains already achieved against the biggest killers of children.
“We are on the eve of a unprecedented expansion of vaccination programmes,” said Dagfinn Høybra°ten, Chair of the GAVI Alliance. “Since 2000, GAVI Alliance partners have vaccinated an additional 440 million children, saving six million lives. In Brussels, we will present an historical opportunity to go even further and secure a healthy future for a generation of vaccinated children in developing countries, a generation that hold the keys to their countries’ futures.”
Immunisation is widely recognised as one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions ever introduced, preventing between two to three million deaths every year. Yet each year more than 22 million children – many of them in the poorest and most remote communities have little or no access to a full course of the most basic vaccines. One in five of all children who die before the age of five lose their lives to vaccine-preventable diseases.
Central to the Alliance’s on-going drive to immunise more children has been an unprecedented acceleration in the number of new vaccines introduced by the 73 countries that receive GAVI support. Between 2011 and the end of 2013, 93 new vaccine introductions were initiated with GAVI support and a further 50 are projected for 2014.
EP News Bureau – Mumbai
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