Healthy lifestyle

. Interviewer: What proportion of children are currently benefiting from immunization programmes?
Expert: A huge amount. Around 83% of children are receiving vaccinations, preventing over 2 million deaths per year. This is due to an enormous push over the last ten or twenty years to make sure that vaccinations are getting out to the poorest people and into the most isolated regions. Vaccination programmes have the widest reach of all public health programmes worldwide. And we’ve had great success. Measles is down 71% since 2000; the number of polio cases last year was just 223—so the eradication programme is well on its way to achievement. We’ve also made huge strides in our campaign to reduce tetanus. In the 1980s, there were 800,000 cases – last year there were less than 60,000.
Interviewer: That’s a great achievement.
Expert: It is, and it’s easy to sit back... rest on your laurels and think ’ Great – what next?’ but that fact is, vaccinations are an ongoing process. If the momentum isn’t maintained, if there isn’t continued investment into these programmes, the number of cases will steadily rise again. The other point is that these great achievements are meaningless to those 17% of children who don’t receive vaccinations. That amounts to 20 million children. These are inevitably the poorest, those with the worst access to health care, and those who are most likely to get sick through poor living conditions, inadequate clean water, and so on. More work needs to be done to ensure we are reaching everybody. And I’m not just talking about those in isolated rural areas. They may live in a slum, for example. Because they’re outside any system, they’re overlooked.
Interviewer: How can you go about rectifying that?
Expert: Well, several ways really. First, we need to identify where these children are and then dig deep to find out why the children aren’t being immunized. We know, for example, that there is a definite correlation between a mother’s level of education and the child’s immunization status. In this case, it’s a matter of reaching these women by whatever means is most effective – bear in mind that these women may be illiterate, and so just delivering leaflets everywhere isn’t necessarily going to work. Or it could be a totally different reason – the health worker doesn’t have time, money, or transport to reach certain places. It’s about identifying the reasons and putting practices into place to address these bottlenecks directly.
Interviewer: What else is your immunization programme focusing on at the moment?
Expert: Well, as well as making sure vaccines get out to people, we also need to pay consideration to the logistical aspect. It’s not just about manufacturing lots of vaccines and training nurses to deliver them. These are vaccines – you can’t just stick them in a cupboard until you need them. They need to be stored properly, at specific cool temperatures. And factor into this the fact that poor countries often have unreliable power systems. That’s why we’ve been doing a lot of work in the area of solar refrigeration to make them more reliable and affordable. There also needs to be an effective computer system to monitor consumption and supply and ensure the right number of vaccines reaches the right places at the right time.
Interviewer: How can poorer countries keep the cost of vaccination programmes low?
Expert: A perfect point, and one which is at the heart of our work. Vaccinations can be acquired cheaply—by using generic ones that do not go by a brand name perhaps. But all drugs must be pre-qualified. That means, that they’ve been tested and do what they say they will do. Counterfeit drugs are not uncommon, sadly, and so there needs to be a quality assurance procedure in place. But vaccination programmes are undoubtedly cost-effective, on a national as well as a family level. Less money needs to be set aside for treatment, and it also reduces a country’s disability-adjusted life year, or DALY, that is, the number of years lost as a result of ill-health and early death, as well as the loss of earnings, or in the case of a child, the loss of education, to both the sick person and their carer.

The proportion of the world’s children receiving vaccinations is...

The expert warns against...

According to the expert, many children do not get immunized if they

Leaflets are not effective means of advertising immunization programmes because...

To ensure that vaccinations reach everyone, it is necessary to...

To solve the storage problem, the expert’s organisation is...

The expert mentions that computers are necessary to...

The expert advises against using vaccines which are...

One achievement mentioned by the expert is that...

A DALY is...