Mark Kane

Heidi Lasher

In this advocacy document, the Children's Vaccine Program (CVP) looks at the past 50 years of vaccines and immunisations. They examine the lack of vaccines in resource-poor countries and the lack of initiative in fully developed countries - both which can lead to childhood illness, death, and resurgences of old diseases once considered fully eradicated.

From CVP
"About 26 percent of children (almost 34 million infants each year) still do not have access to basic immunization services, with lowest coverage in sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries, almost half the children have never received a single vaccine. In countries without adequate facilities to care for the sick and disabled, a family member may have to become a full-time caretaker for an ill child -sometimes sacrificing a wage that the family cannot afford to lose. For all these reasons, a child in the developing world is ten times more likely to die of a vaccine-preventable disease than a child in the industrialized world..."