Global immunization experts had reported that ten million additional lives could be saved through child and maternal immunization at an average annual cost of US$ 1 billion, according to a new study by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF. According to Dr Lee, Director-General, Who, “Immunization is one of the best values for public health investment today: adequate resources and the right strategies lead to concrete results. We have achieved much progress already through immunization, but much more can and should be done.” By spending an average annual cost of US$ 1 billion, 70 million children who live in the world’s poorest countries will receive each year life-saving vaccines against the following diseases: tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, rubella, yellow fever, and Japanese encephalitis. The study shows that we can achieve a significant reduction in deaths due to vaccine-preventable diseases with a modest increase in funds, since 2.5 million children under five years old die every year from diseases that can be prevented with currently available or new vaccines.
As we see from the above, immunization is the most effective way to prevent people from infectious diseases that kill many people in developing countries. It is fact that in international health issue, preventing diseases is more cost effective way to save people than take an action after people have diseases. Since, it is the poorest countries that needs money for the immunizations, developed countries need to help these developing countries with aids for the immunizations. Helping these developing countries will also positively affect developed countries because in an interconnected global community like today, there is an increasing vulnerability to the spread of disease.
There's no argument about the effectiveness of immunization. If populations are properly immunized, the rate of infection and disease drops sharply. Vaccines are cost-effective ways to keep disease down and if made accessible to the people that need it most, would help make great progress in the eradication of vaccine-preventable diseases. This would require vaccine manufacturers to be willing to make price cuts to make their vaccines more affordable to the poorest countries in the world. Foreign aid groups can try to subsidize them as well.
ReplyDeleteImmunizations are great, cheap ways to prevent many long term health problems for a large part of the population. But it's not as easy as simply buying the vaccines and handing them out. Many medical workers need to be brought in to countries in need in order to provide the vaccines, and in many countries such an endeavor would be unsafe due to political conflicts and unrest. The deployment strategy for the vaccines would need to be carefully designed and implemented, or else many of the resources would be wasted.
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