Help give everyone a shot at life: Support world immunization

I was performing a study examining costs of malaria testing and treatment in Nigeria, and I’ll never forget seeing a young girl who was brought in by her family one night. Her arms and legs were stiff and immobile. Her back was twisted, flexed, and arched upwards . Everyone was terrified. She couldn’t move and she was having difficulty breathing.

Fortunately, she received emergent treatment and survived, but she nearly died from an advanced infection from tetanus, an infectious disease that can be prevented by vaccination.

She had opisthotonic posturing, which is a lethal effect of the toxin produced by the bacteria that causes tetanus. This advanced manifestation is practically unheard of in the U.S. and I do not know of any U.S. physicians who have even seen a case.

April 24-30 is World Immunization Week and vaccination has made deaths from numerous ailments such as tetanus and measles a relative rarity in the U.S. and much of the developed world.

While we may take it for granted that children in the United States and Connecticut have access to vaccines, the World Health Organization estimates that 19.5 million infants are still missing basic vaccines.

One and a half million children die each year, or more than 4,000 children a day, from vaccine-preventable diseases. This means one of 5 deaths of children under age 5 is preventable, because we have a solution to this problem.

As physicians, we often see the toll so many illnesses cause that we wish could be vaccine preventable.

From 2000 to 2015, the measles vaccine reduced measles deaths by 79 percent , or 20.3 million lives saved. Polio, once a much more common disabling and potentially deadly disease, has been reduced by 99.9 percent since 1988, and the disease only remains endemic in a few countries. Small pox, a major cause of death and illness for thousands of years, was eradicated due to the global vaccination effort.

As a member of the United Nations Foundation’s Shot@Life campaign, I have spoken about reducing childhood deaths around the world by maintaining funding levels for global vaccination programs. Global vaccine funding accounts for less than 1 percent of the American federal budget, but this funding saves 2.5 million lives each year.

I encourage you to support efforts to help children around the world by supplying costeffective vaccines to areas that need it the most. Please take 10 minutes and use it for emailing, calling, or meeting with your members of Congress about the importance of local and global vaccines.