Blogs

At this crucial moment for immunisation, considering community perceptions of vaccination has never been more important.

In our "Champions for Change" workshop, ACTION trained its newest group of media champions; the participants include several pediatricians and a former senator and polio survivor. The eight are buoyed and ready to get started with their work as advocates for child health in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

CSOs reflected on Gavi’s past and future at the Mid-Term Review. Speaking on the opening plenary panel, Chris Dendys of RESULTS Canada said, “we need to identify better why children are being missed and how we reach them regardless of where they live.”

The last case of wild polio in the United States was recorded in 1979. Latin America and the Caribbean celebrated its victory over the lethal childhood infection more than 26 years ago, making the Americas the first region of the world to eliminate the disease. Retired director of PAHO, Sir George Alleyne, describes the story of how the region became the first to defeat the once lethal childhood infection and how it has sustained its infectious disease control programs since as one filled with good fortune, intrigue, political will, the value of effective public policy and planning, and value of stakeholder buy-in.

Each year, the timing of World Immunisation Week coincides with ANZAC Day, when we acknowledge the achievements and sacrifices of our military personnel. In 2018, two 100th anniversaries remind us that infectious diseases have taken, and still take, a greater toll than the loss of life in warfare.

As the flu season begins in Australia, several media reports have reminded us that the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 led to more deaths than military and civilian casualties in the war (estimated at 20 million) in order to strengthen the argument for us to have our flu vaccinations.

It is also a time to remember the millions of preventable deaths that occur today due to poor health and nutrition, and to promote the actions to prevent these deaths.

I remember being vaccinated against smallpox as a child. We got the vaccine every two to three years to protect us during epidemics—and these were frequent enough. Thanks to a global immunization campaign by the World Health Organization (WHO), smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980; the last known case was in Somalia in 1977.

A global campaign to eradicate polio seems set to yield similar results. Last year, there were only eight reported cases worldwide, three of which were in Pakistan.

A Pakistani female vaccine worker carries a cooler of polio vaccines to the remote town of Harnai. Today she will have to administer 50 vaccines. This is her third visit to Harnai in three months and she now knows all the children there. Some of them wait for her up the street. They giggle and scatter as she approaches. She’s on a first name basis with many of the mothers, and some already feel like friends.

The World Immunization Week advocacy campaign is premised on the evidence, proven by decades of research, that vaccines are a safe and effective way to prevent many childhood diseases and deaths. This year’s theme, “#Vaccines work!” affirms the benefits of vaccines as invaluable in promoting health security and helping countries accelerate sustainable development. ACTION believes further that “a healthy society is a productive society” and supports immunization programs as central to ending poverty.

ACTION’s blog series for World Immunization Week offers a perspective from Pakistan of the fight to end poverty for good, the role of women in successful immunization efforts, ways to ensure that polio funding wind-down means a scale up for health systems funding, improving immunization rates in Africa, and lessons learned from immunization campaigns and transition in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This World Immunization Week, we’re exploring how to be “protected together” through immunization, and one of the best examples is polio eradication. Through world-wide cross-sector cooperation, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has helped protect us all by removing the threat of paralysis and death from this preventable disease. As we get closer to the goal of a polio-free world, we must plan ahead so that polio eradication does not lead to the end of aggressive immunization efforts or of creating sustainable health systems.