The New Children's Vaccine Initiative
"A vision of vaccination for the 21st century"
Widespread adoption of new vaccines for diseases such as rotavirus diarrhoea and pneumococcal pneumonia in infants, and widespread deployment of under used traditional vaccines for disease like measles, could save up to 12 million lives a year, says the new CVI Strategic Plan.
The push to get at least 80 per cent of the world's children immunised reached its goal around 1990. Since then, there has been enormous progress towards polio eradication, but no new vaccines have been introduced widely, and the percentage of children vaccinated has not significantly increased.
"Two things in particular need to happen, more governments must take full responsibility for expanding their own immunisation programs and we must work in broad collaboration with vaccine companies, which has never taken place before", says John LaMontagne, Chairman of the CVI task force on strategic planning and director of the microbiology and infectious diseases programme at the US National Institute of Health.
Nearly four million lives can be saved by the full deployment of existing but under used vaccines, which cost from pennies to a few dollars per dose. Target diseases for these vaccines include pertussis (whooping cough), 350,000 lives; measles, 1.1 million; hepatitis B, 800,000; Hib disease (causing meningitis and pneumonia) 500,000; tetanus, 500,000; rubella, 300,000; yellow fever, 30,000.
In addition, more than 8 million children and adults die each year from diseases preventable by vaccines currently under development, which include; pneumococcal pneumonia in children, 1.2 million deaths; rotavirus diarrhoea, 600,000; other diarrhoea diseases, 2 million; acute respiratory virus infections, 400,000; malaria, 2 million; and HIV/AIDS, 2.3 million. Industrialised countries will see the first use of these vaccines, but the plan contains strategies for accelerating their availability to all countries at "affordable" prices.
The development and testing of some of these new vaccines should be completed by the year 2005, says the plan.
The CVI Strategic Plan was produced by a multi-disciplinary, broad based task force. It lays out a framework of goals and actions to better protect children against infectious diseases. The Plan is endorsed by UNICEF, UNDP, WHO, the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and the vaccine industry, who all collaborated in its development. It emphasises the need for players at all steps in the vaccine continuum - research, development, production, quality assurance, supply, utilisation, monitoring of impact - to act in a more cohesive fashion on priorities, and for all governments to recognise the value of vaccination and commit the additional resources necessary to protect children from suffering, disability and death.
Copies of the plan are available from: CVI Secretariat, 20 Avenue Appia, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. Telephone: +41 22/791 47 99 or Fax: +41 22/791 48 88 or E-mail: cvi@who.ch
Reproduced from and with acknowledgement to Children's Vaccine Initiative Forum (No 15 - February 1998)
