Bangladesh vaccine capacity doubled

Bangladesh has nearly doubled its vaccine storage capacity paving the way to introduce pneumococcal vaccine early next year to prevent killer pneumonia.

Health minister AFM Ruhal Haque on Sunday inaugurated the newly installed 10 cold rooms at the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) building in the capital Dhaka saying the infrastructure was essential for immunisation.

“We could not introduce pneumococcal vaccine due to shortage of cold storages,” he said.

Canadian government and Unicef supported the effort to increase the storage capacity to nearly 210 cubic meters from around 100.

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

Currently vaccines against nine diseases are being administered to children under 1 year old.

The full coverage is more than 85 percent, an achievement that helped Bangladesh to become one of the six countries in the world that achieved MDG on child mortality before terms, 2015.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation also awarded Bangladesh twice for the best coverage in the world.

But inequalities still remain. Statistics show the poorest kids are less likely to come under the full vaccine coverage than the richest.

The coverage is 71 percent in some low-performing districts while it is 94 percent in the high-performing areas.

Unicef Representative Pascal Villeneuve extolled Bangladesh’s success in immunisation. ‘Very few’ people imagined that densely populated Bangladesh would be able to achieve MDG on child mortality, he said.

“Even fewer imagined it will be before the timeline.”

The Canadian High Commissioner in Dhaka Heather Cruden hoped the new cold rooms would help the government to ensure its ‘uninterrupted supply of vaccines’.

She said Bangladesh was one of the 20th ‘focused’ countries of her government.

The Canadian government earlier in 2005 supported installation of cold rooms that helped Bangladesh to introduce influenza vaccine (Hib) in the routine immunisation.

The World Health Organisation representative Thusara Fernando, however, said they would be ‘happy’ to help Bangladesh improve its district cold chain system for carrying out immunisation.