Immunizations

Immunizations are an important part of child development. Since immunizations have been developed and their use has become widespread, many diseases have been prevented and childhood death rates have gone down. I recently took my son in for his 12 month well-baby visit and I was amazed at how many vaccinations he received just at this visit-a total of 6!

Schools in the United States (and many childcare programs as well) require that children’s vaccines are up to date before they can attend. This helps ensure that children are receiving their vaccinations and helps prevent outbreaks.

However, vaccines are not available to many children worldwide-often times due to their high cost. In 2009, a new initiative, Advance Market Commitment (AMC) was launched to help fund the “development and manufacturing of new vaccines for developing nations” as well as help set guaranteed prices for the vaccines and allow countries to start planning immunization programs for when the vaccines are available (Luffman, 2011).

In Nicaragua, between 80-99% (depending on the vaccination) of children are immunized with the available immunizations (UNICEF). Nicaragua was the first developing country to receive vaccines from AMC when the pneumococcal vaccination program was launched in December 2010.  Pneumococcal diseases (such as pneumonia) are the cause of death for 1/5 of Nicaragua’s children under the age of 5 (Luffman, 2011) so this program could potentially prevent many deaths.

I am lucky that my son has access to so many vaccinations and hopefully the AMC initiative will help many more children and families gain access to them as well. AMC’s goal is to include 40+ countries in its pneumococcal vaccination program by 2015- it’s estimated that if reached this could potentially save 900,000 children’s lives (Luffman, 2011)!

Researching this topic helped me gain more knowledge about the importance of immunizations in early childhood. In this field, it is important to learn about all aspects of child development, including health. The information that I gained about this topic can be shared with parents and families-one resource that I found particularly informative on vaccines was the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/.

References:

 AMC: Advance Market Commitment for Vaccines. (2007). Vaccine AMCs. Retrieved from: http://www.vaccineamc.org/index.html.

Luffman, Laurinda. (5 January 2011). Children in Nicaragua are first to receive new pneumonia vaccine. SOS Children’s Villages. Retrieved from: http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/children-in-nicaragua-are-the-first-to-receive-new-pneumonia-vaccine.

UNICEF. (2 March 2010). Statistics: Nicaragua. UNICEF. Retrieved from:  

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/nicaragua_statistics.html.