Fighting Vaccine-Preventable Childhood Diseases
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| A baby sleeps through use of the Uniject, a prefilled single-dose device USAID supports. Source: Carib Nelson, PATH |
Medical science has long known that immunizations can protect children from illness and death at an early age and also shield them from the long-term effects of illness on growth and development – healthier children do better in school and become more productive, higher-earning adults.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has worked with partners across the globe to confront the challenge of vaccine-preventable diseases and help immunize children in remote and underdeveloped parts of the world. Over the decades, tens of millions of infants and children have survived the momentary pain and discomfort of immunization to gain protection from disease.
USAID was a partner in the 1970s campaign to rid the world of smallpox. In the 1980s, USAID supported the World Health Organization’s Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), a program to expand access to immunization against childhood tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and measles. By 1990, coverage for these preventable but often fatal diseases reached 70 percent globally, and their occurrence fell dramatically. Even though this was fairly good news at the global level, coverage in much of Africa and Asia nonetheless remained well below the global mark of 70 percent.
In the 1990s, immunization coverage leveled off and even declined in some nations. EPI’s momentum slowed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a sense that the job was done. In economically struggling nations, other priorities demanded attention, and major donors also turned their attention to other desperate problems.
Today, the United States is one of the largest, most engaged donors to the GAVI Alliance (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), an alliance forged in 2000 as part of the international community’s response to lagging immunization coverage. GAVI is devoted to saving children’s lives and protecting people’s health through the widespread use of vaccines. The United States has committed more than $490 million since GAVI’s inception, and USAID has been engaged in GAVI at both the technical and political levels. Since 2000, more than 300 million additional children have been protected against disease.
USAID Support Improves Vaccination Safety
USAID investments have led to products that now reach millions, saving lives throughout the developing world. Current and future investments are targeted to have similar, large- scale public health impacts. USAID’s “signature” products include safe injection technologies like the SoloShot auto-disable (AD) syringe, which is automatically disabled after one use, thus preventing transmission of bloodborne diseases that can result from reuse or improper sterilization of a contaminated needle or syringe. Since their commercial introduction in 1992, more than 1 billion SoloShot syringes have been supplied to public health programs in more than 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. UNICEF – which has already distributed hundreds of millions of AD syringes to immunization programs – now provides only AD syringes (many of them Soloshot) to countries requesting disposable syringes. The transmission of bloodborne diseases due to dirty needles is reduced by an estimated 90 percent in programs using these products.
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