Humanely Possible campaign to boost immunisation around the world
- Pushing back the frontiers of disease
- Protecting a generation of children
- Delivering vaccines to the last mile
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gavi global partnership, launched a global campaign to boost immunisation programmes worldwide.
Humanely Possible is a campaign launched to mark the start of World Immunization Week, celebrated annually during the last week of April.
"Thanks to immunization, more children are surviving and thriving beyond the age of five today than at any other time in history," said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
Indeed, global immunization programmes have shown what is humanly possible when many stakeholders, including world leaders, regional and global health agencies, scientists, charities, aid agencies, businesses and communities work together.
Pushing back the frontiers of disease
The health agency's director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted that "vaccines are among the most powerful inventions in history", preventing once-feared diseases.
"Thanks to vaccines, smallpox has been eradicated, polio is on the brink, and with the more recent development of vaccines against diseases such as malaria and cervical cancer, we are pushing back the frontiers of disease," he said. "With continued research, investment and collaboration, we can save millions more lives today and over the next 50 years."
A landmark study to be published in the British medical journal The Lancet reveals that global immunisation efforts have already saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past five decades, 101 million of them infants.
This equates to six lives saved every minute of every year over the past 50 years.
The WHO-led study showed that immunisation is the health intervention that does the most to ensure that babies not only reach their first birthday, but continue to lead healthy lives into adulthood.
Measles vaccines have contributed the most to reducing child mortality, according to the study, which also shows that vaccination against measles and 13 other diseases, including diphtheria, polio, rubella, tetanus, tuberculosis and yellow fever, has directly contributed to reducing child mortality by 40% worldwide and by more than 50% in the African region over the past 50 years.
According to the study, which will be released for the 50th anniversary of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation next month, for every life saved through immunisation, an average of 66 years of full health was gained, with a total of 10.2 billion years of full health gained over the five decades.
Protecting a generation of children
In 2000, WHO, UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were the principal founding members of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, created to expand the impact of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation and help the world's poorest countries increase coverage, benefit from new vaccines and extend the reach of protection against a growing number of preventable diseases.
Today, Gavi has helped protect an entire generation of children and provides vaccines against 20 infectious diseases, said Dr Sania Nishtar, CEO of the Alliance.
"In just over two decades, we have seen incredible progress, protecting more than a billion children, helping to halve child mortality in these countries and providing billions in economic benefits," she said.
Delivering vaccines to the last mile
UNICEF, one of the world's largest purchasers of vaccines globally, procures more than 2 billion doses each year on behalf of countries and partners to reach nearly half of the world's children.
To increase immunisation coverage, the agency also works to deliver vaccines to the last mile, sometimes using camels, to ensure that even remote and underserved communities have access to immunisation services.
The head of the agency said it is about working together. "We must build on the momentum and ensure that all children, everywhere, have access to life-saving immunisations," Russell added.
That is the ultimate goal of World Immunization Week: that more people and their communities are protected from vaccine-preventable diseases.