vaccines
In honor of World Immunization Week, April 21 to 28, and the GAVI Alliance’s launch of two vaccines in Ghana on April 26, here is an interview with Dr. Mame Yaa Nyarko, pediatrician and head of Clinical Services at the Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital in Accra. It was conducted by Doune Porter, GAVI Alliance earlier this year.
Pediatrician Dr. Mame Yaa Nyarko examines a child recovering from severe diarrhea in one of her wards at the Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital in Accra. Photo Credit: GAVI/Doune Porter/2012
Dr. Mame Yaa Nyarko maintains a smile as she works. Examining the children in her charge, she takes a moment to comfort them. But the Head of Clinical Services at the Princess Marie Louise Children’s Hospital in Accra knows that every moment is precious. She has a lot of patients.
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Interview with Dr. K.O. Antwi-Agyei, Ghana’s Expanded Program on Immunization Manager by Doune Porter, GAVI Alliance.
Dr. K.O. Antwi-Agyei, manager of Ghana’s Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) wants no part of “business as usual.” He and his team are working on an unprecedented joint GAVI-supported introduction of pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines, which will protect children against the leading causes of pneumonia and severe diarrhea. The launch will take place in Accra on April 26, 2012.
“Pneumonia and diarrhea are killing our children,” says Dr. Antwi-Agyei. “Yes, it is challenging to introduce two vaccines at the same time, but the diseases are not waiting for us, so that when we are finished dealing with one, only then will the other show itself. In the meantime, people are dying. We need to do business unusually.
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This blog post on World Immunization Week 2012 is by Dan Thomas, head of media and communications at the GAVI Alliance.
Have you ever been to the movies and seen a trailer for a film that you previously had no interest in seeing and then suddenly thought to yourself “That is a film I CANNOT MISS”?
That was the idea behind GAVI’s most recent production. It’s a three-minute film by Ryan Youngblood, a talented young American filmmaker, that I stumbled across in Kigali one day, and I think he and producer Doune Porter more than fulfilled their brief.
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Last week in DC, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mercy Ahun from the GAVI Alliance Secretariat. When I first met her two years ago, she was GAVI’s Director of Program Delivery, but recently she was named GAVI’s Special Representative to GAVI-Eligible Countries. In this role, she serves as a bridge between GAVI, countries receiving GAVI support, and donors, and she works to develop customized approaches that deliver even more effective results on the ground.
ONE is really excited that in less than 1 month, Ghana will become the first country to roll out pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines at the same time. Especially as a Ghanaian, what does this milestone mean to you?
It’s been exciting! I remember the first time I was talking to Ghana’s EPI (Extended Program on Immunization) Manager about this, and I said, are you sure you want to do this? And he said yes—we are close to achieving MDG 5 (reducing child deaths); doing this allows us to hit two birds with one stone. And when I started looking at their vaccine programs, and saw that they already had achieved high coverage levels of other vaccines, I said yes, I think the system is strong enough to do this. And I think it is important to document the process in Ghana so then others can learn from it.
I go to Ghana about six times in a year, and we have an excellent relationship not just with the EPI Manager but with other groups in the Ministry of Health and with the partners. When we’re in Ghana, you can catch the excitement. I remember that one person said to me, “It feels like the whole world is looking at us”, and to that I just think: wow.
What does a country like Ghana need to do to prepare itself for a vaccines roll out?
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Have you checked out ONE’s new Tax Tool on our website? It shows how much of your salary goes toward life-saving health interventions. In this post, Khai Tram from ONE’s global health policy team talks about why vaccines are an effective use of our taxpayer dollars.
An estimated 7.6 million children die before their fifth birthday every year, and nearly all of these deaths will be due to preventable or treatable causes. Deadly childhood diseases, such as pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, can be easily prevented through immunizations, but insufficient access to vaccines and other basic life-saving interventions continues to be a major barrier to reducing child deaths globally.
In 2000, the GAVI Alliance was launched with a mission to accelerate access to new and underused vaccines in the world’s poorest countries. After a decade of work, GAVI and its partners have already saved the lives of more than 5.5 million children and continue to build on the existing vaccine portfolio.
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Check out this great news on rotavirus, courtesy of Candace Rosen at PATH (from PATH’s RotaFlash newsletter), which you all helped to support with your advocacy for GAVI last spring!
Diarrhea is the third biggest killer of children under five years of age in Zambia (40 per day; 15,000 each year), and rotavirus, the most common cause of severe and fatal diarrhea in young children, is responsible for nearly one-third of those deaths. As in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest rates of rotavirus mortality worldwide, rotavirus contributes heavily to the tremendous drain on the health and economic resources in Zambia:
Approximately 41 percent of young children hospitalized for severe diarrhea are infected with rotavirus.
An estimated 4,506 children under age five die from rotavirus diarrhea annually.
Vaccines are the best way to protect children in Zambia and the rest of the world from severe rotavirus diarrhea and the deadly dehydrating diarrhea that it causes.
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Rachel Glennerster, Executive Director of J-PAL, explains how an incentive as small as a bag of lentils can encourage parents to get their children immunized.
Photo credit: J-PAL South Asia
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge of global poverty, but there are many quick and easy things that have been proven to work. Preventative health care, including childhood vaccinations, is particularly effective and has saved millions of lives. But millions of children are still not vaccinated, even where vaccines are free and available. Time to despair about deep-rooted cultural hostility to modern medicine? Actually, procrastination is probably just as big a culprit.
In rich countries, we are constantly nudged to do the right thing. My son was fully immunized only after I got a threatening letter saying he would be expelled from preschool unless I submitted proof of immunization by the end of the week. Did I fail to do it earlier because I was uncertain of the benefits of immunization? No, I have written a book on the subject. But I was busy, and I kept putting it off. It turns out, I have much in common with mothers in Rajasthan, India.
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