Risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks at 30-year high says PAHO

Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Dr. Jarbas Barbosa had called on countries to urgently step-up routine vaccination programmes as the risk of disease outbreaks in the Americas reaches a 30-year high due to a decline in vaccination coverage.

While the Americas was the first region in the world to eliminate polio in 1994 and has historically been a world leader in disease control and elimination, “national immunization programmes have suffered numerous setbacks over the last decade,” Dr. Barbosa said during a recent media briefing.

Inadequate sustainable financing for immunization and an increase in vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation have been among the primary drivers of the drop in coverage, he added, factors further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, the Region of the Americas is the second in the world with the worst vaccine coverage. Around 2.7 million children did not receive all their vaccine doses in 2021, leaving them without full protection against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Two countries – Brazil and Mexico – account for more than 50% of children that have never received a vaccine in the region.

Failure to effectively implement and maintain routine vaccination coverage leaves children “susceptible to diseases such as polio, tetanus, measles and diphtheria,” Dr. Barbosa said.

In the run up to Vaccination Week in the Americas from April 22-29, the PAHO Director urged countries to step up efforts to “recover the vaccination coverage rates that protected us in the past.”

Vaccination Week in the Americas is “an extraordinary strategy to complement the efforts of national immunization programmes,” Dr. Barbosa said, supporting efforts to protect more than one billion people of all ages since its inception 20 years ago.

This year’s theme was ‘Get up to date, EachVaccineCounts’ and the aim was to reach more than 92 million people across the Region with life-saving vaccines.

In St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Ministry of Health staged a series of activities that began with a vaccine awareness and wellness drive in Bequia on April 22, and ended with a health fair on April, 29, on the tarmac of the decommissioned E.T Joshua Airport.

Senior Nursing Officer ( Community Nursing Services) Sr Julie Russel told SEARCHLIGHT last week Friday at one of their events at Heritage Square that “as recently as 2022, our lowest coverage was for BCG vaccine which was 94 per cent…”. She noted however, that the need to maintain vigilance was still necessary even though there was full immunisation among primary school aged children.