Cell phones for vaccine coverage

Bangladesh, with two global awards under its belt for high rate of child immunisation, now seeks greater reach using mobile phones.

The ICDDR,B, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) and the JHU Global mHealth Initiative, with Dhaka-based social enterprise mPower-Health on Tuesday announced that they were researching this course of action with the help of the government.

ICDDR,B says using a virtual vaccine record software ‘mTikka’, they are trying to develop ‘sustainable mechanism’ for the Bangladesh Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), responsible for children’s vaccination.

EPI says they can cover more than 80 people children under-1 years of age with their all vaccines that brought them ‘GAVI best performance award’ twice. But they want to achieve more than 90 percent child immunisation.

The coverage is, however, low among children living in remote rural districts and urban pockets , varying between 42 percent and 60 percent.

“We want to apply mobile technology, as almost everyone now uses a cell phone. We’ll try to remind them so that they come for vaccinating their kids,” the EPI Line Director Dr Syed Abu Jafar Md. Musa told bdnews24.com.

He said apart from some remote rural or hill regions, the other tough proposition is to reach city slum dwellers who somewhat float around.

Almost two out of three people in Bangladesh have mobile phones.

ICDDR,B in a media release said the process to examine the 'mobile option' has began in March after its scientist Md. Jasim Uddin received a Grand Challenges Canada (GCC) award to conduct it.

It says “absence of effective systems to track newborn children and remind parents about immunisation sessions” were the main reasons for low vaccine coverage among hard-to-reach and street children.

“Our study will assess the feasibility and effectiveness of the auto birth registration and patient reminder systems through use of mobile phones,” Jasim Uddin said.

The mobile-phone based ‘mTikka’ system centers around a “cloud” based national database holding vaccination records, allowing families, doctors and health supervisors to view and update every registered child’s record.

The project uses a common Android phone technology for the EPI workers, and allows any other user to use SMS to download an infant’s ‘virtual mTikka card’.

Pilot studies are on in rural northwestern districts, a hard-to-reach village of Jamalgonj, and a city slum under Dhaka City Corporation.

Aiming to reduce child deaths from the vaccine-preventable diseases, the government started the EPI in 1979 with six vaccines against infectious diseases – tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles.

In recent years, Hepatitis B, haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) and rubella vaccines had been added to the repetoire.

The government is also on course to introduce new vaccines like pneumococcal against pneumonia infections that mostly kill children under-5.