Red Cross Blogs

More funding is needed for global vaccine programmes

By Katrina Crew
June 13, 2011 at 12:15 pm

Every year, nearly two million children die from preventable diseases. Pneumonia and diarrhoea (rotavirus) are the two biggest killers, responsible for around 40 per cent of childhood deaths. A simple vaccine could save many of those children’s lives.

Today, donors and representatives from governments and aid agencies are meeting in London to find ways of funding a global immunisation campaign that would make new vaccines available for the world’s poorest children.

GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations) is a partnership of public and private sector organisations working together to improve children’s access to life-saving vaccines.

In the last decade, an estimated 280 million children who hadn’t previously been vaccinated received jabs through GAVI-supported programmes. The alliance estimates 5 million children’s lives have been saved.

But there’s a funding gap for future programmes. If the alliance could raise $3.7 billion (around £2.2 billion), they hope to save 4 million more children by 2015.

The Red Cross endorses GAVI’s call to action. We’ve supported immunisation campaigns in some of the world’s poorest areas. In Haiti, even before the earthquake many children weren’t immunised against measles. After the quake, as many moved to crowded camps, the international community realized children needed to vaccinated as soon as possible to prevent a major health catastrophe. The Red Cross supported the Ministry of Health to vaccinate all children in displacement camps. With our support, over 152,300 people were immunised between 6 February and 15 March.

In Pakistan, the British Red Cross supports the Pakistan Red Crescent’s mobile health units, which vaccinate people in remote villages in Baluchistan, near the border with Kandahar.

And in West Africa, we support community health programmes in Sierra Leone and Liberia, focusing on children under five and women of child-bearing age. Trained volunteers and staff help their clients understand and access life-saving immunisations.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies chairs the GAVI civil society constituency, representing relief and voluntary organisations that carry out health services around the world.

They have issued their own call to action (pdf), asking not only for donors to fill the funding gap but also that the alliance supports health workers and makes sure vaccines are affordable for developing countries.

Vaccination is every child’s right. And today is an opportunity to make it a reality.

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Tags: children, community based health and care, GAVI, Haiti, healthcare workers, immunisation, Liberia, Pakistan, public health, Sierra Leone, vaccines

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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