GENEVA, Switzerland
Levels of childhood immunisations against dangerous diseases such as measles, tetanus and diphtheria have dropped alarmingly during the COVID-19 pandemic, putting millions of children at risk, United Nations agencies said on Wednesday.
“The avoidable suffering and death caused by
children missing out on routine immunisations could be far greater than COVID-19 itself,”
World Health Organization (WHO) Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a joint report with UNICEF.
Three-quarters of the 82 countries that
responded to a survey for the report said they had suffered coronavirus-related
disruptions to their immunisation programmes as of May 2020.
Most problems were linked to a lack of
sufficient personal protection equipment (PPE) for health workers, travel
restrictions, and low health worker staffing levels – all of which led to
immunisation services being curbed or shut down.
At least 30 measles vaccination campaigns have
been or are at risk of being cancelled, threatening new outbreaks of the
contagious viral disease this year and beyond, the report said.
Measles outbreaks were already on the rise,
infecting nearly 10 million people in 2018 and killing 140,000 of them – mostly
children, according to WHO data.
For diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis,
preliminary data for the first four months of 2020 “points to a substantial
drop” in the number of children getting all three doses of the DTP vaccine
that protects against them, the report said – the first time in 28 years that
the world could see a fall in coverage for this routine childhood immunisation.
Data for 2019 showed that nearly 14 million
children worldwide missed out on life-saving vaccines. Most of these children
live in Africa and are likely to lack access to other health services, the
report said.
It said progress on immunisation was already stalling before the new coronavirus emerged and spread around the world, but the pandemic made a bad situation worse. - Agencies
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