Washington, October 21: Even as a record 106 million infants were vaccinated last year against life-threatening diseases, nearly 24 million babies went without full protection with social factors inhibiting immunization in India, according to a new global health assessment.
To get the full round of first-year vaccinations to children in the poorest countries will take another $1 billion a year, said a report released Wednesday by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Unicef and the World Bank.
It is a good investment, the report argued, noting vaccination is preventing the deaths of 2.5 million children every year. If 90 percent of the world’s children under age 5 years got the vaccinations that are routine in wealthy countries, another two million deaths a year could be prevented by 2015.
Many of the unimmunised children live in isolated rural areas without easy access to health facilities, the report noted. Some – like the children of “illegal” immigrants in urban areas, or the many children whose births go unregistered – may not even officially “exist”, the report said.
In India, recent studies have also highlighted a number of social factors that may inhibit mothers from seeking immunisation, including gender, religion, and social status like caste, the report noted.
In 1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries and paralysing an estimated 350,000 children every year. By mid-2009, indigenous poliovirus remained endemic in only four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.
The numbers of new cases reported for these four countries in 2009 as at end June were: Afghanistan: 10; India: 89; Nigeria: 321; and Pakistan: 20 (26).
In India, the key state of Uttar Pradesh was still struggling to stop a new Type 1 outbreak following an importation in mid-2008 from neighbouring Bihar state.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, security was increasingly compromising access to children in parts of both countries, while oversight and accountability remained weak in other parts of the countries.
It is estimated that, in 2002 there were 493,000 cases of cervical cancer and over 274,000 related deaths.
The highest incidence rates are in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and also in parts of Asia. India alone accounted for nearly a quarter of cases occurring annually in the world.
An estimated 23 million children under one year of age were, in 2007, still not receiving their first dose of measles vaccine through routine immunization with more than a third of them living in India (8.5 million), the report said.
—IANS