1.4 million children could be saved with vaccines

An estimated 1.4 children under five years of age die unnecessarily each year from measles, whooping cough or tetanus, all of them preventable with vaccines, the U.N. Children’s Fund, UNICEF, reported on Thursday.

The worst affected areas are in west and central Africa, in countries of conflict but also in Nigeria, said a new UNICEF report.

While the 1980s showed a surge in vaccination programs around the world, progress remained even or dropped in the 1990s, partly because of a decrease in foreign aid as well as worsening economies in several countries.

“Everybody thought that we were progressing so well that we would just continue to progress. But in fact that did not happen,” Dr. Peter Salama, UNICEF’s chief of immunization, told a news conference.

Some 30 million children are born each year, and since 1990, 103 countries are protecting 90 percent of their children against diseases preventable by vaccines. However another 74 nations have not done so, the report said.

About $1 billion is now being spent on immunizing children and another $1 billion is needed to bring all countries up to a U.N. goal of vaccinating 90 percent of children under one year of age by 2010, Salama said. But this figure could reach $6 billion as new vaccines are produced for diseases that cause diarrhea or pneumonia.

Anne Veneman, executive director of UNICEF, estimated immunization was now preventing 2 million deaths among children under five each year.

“We need to protect the gains we have made in many countries and expand our efforts in others,” she said.

In analyzing coverage in each region, the report said Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East were inching toward 90 percent, but coverage in central and eastern Europe declined to 88 percent in 2001 from a high of 91 percent in 1988.

In South Asia, the figure was 71 percent but west and central Africa, vaccinations averaged at only 48 percent.

The lowest rates for measles vaccinations in 2003 were recorded for Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Nauru and Vanuatu, all under 50 percent.

But Eritrea, a nation affected by war, managed to expand its immunization coverage from 18 percent in 1990 to 84 percent in 2003, because of priorities put into public health systems.

India showed a rate of 67 percent, which left 7.8 million children unvaccinated for measles, the report said.

But even four industrial nations showed a lag, although deaths are rare because of good nutrition and health care. Austria, Britain, Belgium and Ireland have not yet reached 90 percent coverage against measles, and in Belgium and Britain, coverage was lower in 2003 than in 1990, the report said.

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