Health issues in India
Immunisation rates in Uttarakhand fell by more than thirty percentage points in two years. Now the state is using stringent measures to drive immunisation rates upwards. Immunisation rates in the state fell to just 61.32 percent of children aged nine to eleven months in 2017-18. This was down from 99.3 percent coverage in the 2015-16 […]
India is a leading producer of vaccines. It has enjoyed numerous vaccination campaign successes in the past. Despite this, around 60,000 Indian children under five die of vaccine-preventable diseases every year. India has demonstrated its capacity for successful vaccination campaigns in the past. On March 27, 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared India polio-free. […]
Marking World Polio Day on 24 October, 20 million doses of Inactivated Polio Vaccine ShanIPVTM have been delivered to the Indian government by Sanofi Pasteur. These vaccinations were provided to the government via Sanofi’s affiliated company, Hyderabad-based Shantha Biotechnics. The vaccine is notable as the only inactivated vaccine currently being produced domestically. The vaccine is […]
A Delhi government report has announced that two people died of smallpox and 11 died of polio in the capital last year. This announcement caused panic that two eradicated diseases had reemerged in India, though the announcement has since been declared a mistake, likely due to a clerical error. The Delhi government has attempted to […]
With its last reported case of a wild polio infection dating back to January 2011, India completed the three-year mandatory period that a country needs to stay free of fresh polio infections in 2014, allowing it to be endorsed as a polio-free country. India is now introducing injectable polio vaccine (IPV) in its universal immunisation […]
It is only the second time in the history that a disease is being eliminated in India through immunisation after smallpox in May 1980. However, officially the World Health Organisation (WHO) will certify India as polio-free on February 11 after the last of random samples picked up have been be tested. India’s being declared polio-free […]
One of India’s great public health achievements of the last few years has been eradicating wild-type polio infections. Now, an article in the current PLoS Medicine is sure to ruffle feathers amongst those committed to global polio eradication by questioning whether polio can or should be eradicated by 2018. An independent expert board has concluded that […]
On another positive note on health in India: the World Health Organisation on Tuesday lauded India’s efforts in eradicating polio and said the country has not reported a single case of polio in the last 30 months. “You did it. For 30 months you have not got a single case of polio,” WHO Director-General Margaret […]
