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MANILA — Three years after the polio
virus was eradicated in East Asia and the Pacific, health officials
are training their guns on two other equally dangerous diseases —
measles and hepatitis B.
They are entering the battle against the two dreaded diseases
through a more determined immunisation campaign among children.
The infant immunisation strategy was so successful against polio
that in October 2000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared
the region free of this serious infectious disease of the nerves in
the spine.
“After polio, measles and hepatitis B will be given more prominence
in the region’s immunisation strategy,” said Shigeru Omi, the
regional director of WHO’s Western Pacific office in Manila.
“This is the new challenge in our immunisation campaign covering
children,” he said in conjunction with World Health Day on Monday,
which this year is dedicated to “Healthy Environments for Children.”
Omi said measles and hepatitis B posed a “tremendous burden” in the
Western Pacific region, which covers 37 countries, including
Australia, Brunei Darussalam, China, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New
Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.
Measles remains the greatest single cause of death among children,
apart from diarrhoeal diseases.
Attacking mainly children under five years, it is a highly
contagious viral infection and spreads primarily by large
respiratory droplets.
Infants under one year of age have the highest fatality rates.
Hepatitis B is a viral infection of the liver.
Dubbed the “silent killer,” those chronically infected later in life
usually die from cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Measles, on the other hand, remains a “major preventable cause of
death and disability” in Cambodia, Japan, Laos, Papua New Guinea,
the Philippines, Vietnam and China.
Thirty to 40 million measles cases and 777,000 deaths occur each
year around the world.
Even in industrialised Japan, measles kills up to 80 people a year
while in southeast Asia, fatal cases can reach up to 70,000,
researchers say.
A huge challenge is to increase the rate of immunisation.
But health workers say there is opposition to measles vaccine on
religious and cultural grounds as well as fears of adverse side
effects.
Immunisation against measles is also not as simple as for polio, for
which the vaccine is given orally.
Measles immunisation is done using needles and syringes and “you
need to train people, and safety is very important,” Omi said.
He stressed that consistently high immunisation coverage was vital
to check the spread of both measles and hepatitis B.
WHO says hepatitis B claims 800 to 1,000 deaths every day in the
Western Pacific region, where almost all countries have “moderate to
high” rates of chronic infection of the disease.
According to Omi, countries in the region are being urged to
establish protection systems against hepatitis B among 80 per cent
of children by 2004.
Since the end of 2001, all national immunisation programmes in the
region had covered hepatitis B, a concern largely in China,
Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines.
Hepatitis B vaccine can protect up to 95 per cent of infants but a
dose within 24 hours of birth is needed for greatest efficacy. — AFP
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