Global child vaccination needs a data boost

allnurses Guide · Feb 11, 2014

"Vaccinating the world's children saves millions of lives, but the system of monitoring such efforts needs a revamp, says Seth Berkley of the GAVI Alliance

HOW many vaccines do you think it takes to fully immunise a child? One? Three? Perhaps five? By the World Health Organization's reckoning, that number is 11 - that's 11 key vaccines every child should have to protect them from a range of devastating diseases. So why then are we only using three to measure immunisation coverage? By doing so, we are not only giving ourselves a skewed perspective of the state of global childhood immunisation, but we are also in danger of thinking it's job done, when we still have far to go.

At first glance, it appears that we have almost won this particular health battle, with the proportion of the world's children receiving routine vaccinations climbing steadily from 73 per cent a decade ago to about 83 per cent today. But that's only when you measure the uptake of three basic childhood vaccines, completed on the third dose of diphtheria-tetorifice-pertussis (DTP). When you include all of the 11 that the WHO says every child should have, a very different picture emerges. Less than 5 per cent of the world's children are fully immunised when you add BCG (for tuberculosis), measles, rubella, polio, hepatitis B (hep B), Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines.

Such a discrepancy exists because for the last three decades the global health community - governments, international organisations and aid agencies - have used just one or two "tracer" vaccines to measure immunisation coverage, usually the third dose of DTP or sometimes the first dose of measles. In the past, these worked because they not only allowed us to gauge the reach of immunisation programmes, but also, in the case of DTP, it showed the strength of countries' health systems because it requires three contacts with those systems."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129554.200-global-child-vaccination-needs-a-data-boost.html?page=1#.UvpPCX-9KK1