In a bid to cure the fatal disease of pneumonia in children under five, a new vaccine will be introduced in the country within four months which will help to prevent 65 percent of the pneumonia cases in Pakistan.
This was stated by National Program on Immunization Manager Dr Altaf Hussain Bosan while briefing the media here at National Institute of Health (NIH) on Saturday. The briefing was organised in connection with World Pneumonia Day which was observed on Saturday.
He said that for that purpose, the government had successfully secured a financial support worth $680 million dollars from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) for a period of five years adding that $19 million would be contributed by the government of Pakistan.
“The vaccine will be available all over the country as part of free immunisation services for children. This is unprecedented. In the past, it took up to ten to fifteen years for a vaccine that was introduced in high income countries to reach in developing countries. But thanks to GAVI Alliance partners this gap has been significantly reduced,” he added.
Bosan said the World Pneumonia Day was an opportunity to highlight the power of vaccines to prevent millions of child deaths and to celebrate the historic achievements of the rapid rollout of new pneumococcal vaccines.
Dr Bosan said that after every 20 seconds, pneumonia took the life of a child. “It takes the lives of over 1.5 million children every year – more than any other cause of death. Hence it is the biggest killer of children under the age of five years in developing countries” he said.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 716,000 deaths from pneumococcal disease among children aged less than five years could be prevented with full implementation of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines.