Deadly disease eliminated in children under 5 years of age...(o tackle this disease quickly and effici...),Health

The Government of Uganda recently committed national resources to procure Hib vaccine for its infant immunisation programme, in line with the GAVI co-financing policy.

The introduction of Hib vaccine has now completely changed the epidemiology of bacterial meningitis in Uganda, with elimination of meningitis due to Hib as a public health problem says Dr Kekitiinwa Pediatrician at Mulago Hospital,in Kampala Uganda, co-author of the study. High quality surveillance has allowed us to understand and monitor those trends to ensure the quality of the immunisation programme, improve collaboration between clinicians and laboratories and inform on drug susceptibility for the common organisms.

Although Hib vaccines for infants were first licensed in 1991 and have since been widely adopted in industrialised countries, they have not been used extensively in the developing world due to multiple barriers such as limited Hib disease awareness, uncertainty about the burden of disease and concerns about the financial and logistical implications of vaccine introduction. It took almost 15 years for the Hib vaccine to be introduced in developing countries after it was first licensed.

There are efforts underway to bridge this gap by reducing the number of years developing countries have to wait to benefit from new vaccines. In 2007, a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) was announced, aiming at accelerating the introduction of new vaccines in poor countries. The Uganda results follow similar results found in Bangladesh, Kenya, Chile, the Gambia, the United Kingdom, and United States. These studies have all concluded that Hib vaccine cuts the incidence of disease by 88% or more within 3 to 5 years.

In July 2007, a study from Bangladesh showed that routine immunisation of infants with a Hib conjugate vaccine prevented over one third of life-threatening pneumonia cases and approximately
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