•  united nations
• Saturday, October 30, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Experts meeting at the United Nations Monday stressed that immunisation is the key to achieve Millennium Development Goal 4 - reduce child mortality - and unless donors open their purses and close the funding gap, children in the poorest countries will continue to die of vaccine-preventable diarrhoea and pneumonia - the two biggest killers of children under five.

Monday's event was titled 'Achieving MDG 4: The Power of Vaccines and Partnership to Tackle the Major Child Killers', and hosted by U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Republic of Kenya and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI). Kenya's Minister of Public Health and Sanitation, Rose Mugo, said her country had experienced a 35 percent reduction of deaths among children, but only the introduction of new vaccines against diarrhoea and pneumonia would drop child mortality figures even further.

Guillermo Gonzalez, Nicaragua's former health minister and current Special Advisor to the President, said his country was reaching up to 95 percent of children with routine immunisation, with 30 to 40 percent reductions in mortality since the introduction of rotavirus vaccine three years ago. Both underscored the importance of the alliance with GAVI in order to reach those goals. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization - that, together with UNICEF, gave birth to GAVI in 2000 - asked donors to 'open their purses' and invest in vaccines, one of the most cost-effective health intervention.

World leaders gathering at the U.N. Summit on MDGs this week hold the fate of 4.2 million of the poorest children in the poorest nations, GAVI said. During the Alliance's first decade, GAVI partners delivered vaccines that are expected to save 5.4 million lives. Now the only way for most countries to meet MDG 4 - and especially the target of reducing the under-five mortality by two-thirds - is through the widespread introduction of vaccines that can prevent pneumonia and diarrhoea, leading killers of children together with malaria and AIDS. To do that, GAVI requires US 4.3 billion dollars in new funding.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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