Govt wakes up to pneumonia threat

India has, for the first time, decided to vaccinate children against haemophilus influenzae type B (HIB), the bacteria that causes illnesses like meningitis, pneumonia and septic arthritis.

Tamil Nadu will be the first state to vaccinate all new-born children with the HIB vaccine. A HIB immunisation programme will then be rolled out nationally. The decision comes after a $9 million HIB probe project to measure and document the burden of the bacteria found it to be present in abundance in the country.

Although India, with high mortality rates, had long known that pneumonia and meningitis were significant concerns, it assumed that HIB was not a major cause before this study was conducted.

Funded by GAVI and USAID, the probe was undertaken at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, and the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata.

The project, spearheaded by the Indian Council of Medical Research, was part of a $37 million HIBS initiative recently launched jointly by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and WHO.

ICMR director general Dr N K Ganguly told TOI, “We have reviewed fresh evidence and have decided to use the HIB vaccine in India. We have asked GAVI to provide us funding worth $20 million to procure the vaccines which will first be used in Tamil Nadu and then on children across India. We will introduce the vaccine as soon as we get the grant from GAVI.”

Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal have also decided to introduce the vaccine. Ganguly’s announcement comes just a day after ‘The Paediatric Infectious Disease Journal’ published the findings of a large-scale study from Bangladesh on the effectiveness of the HIB vaccine.

The study, conducted by researchers from International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, Dhaka Shishu Hospital and Johns Hopkins University showed that routinely vaccinating 60,000 children in Dhaka against HIB conjugate vaccine prevented over one-third of life-threatening pneumonia cases and approximately 90% of HIB meningitis cases.

“There has been disagreement about the total burden of HIB pneumonia and meningitis in Asia, but our findings provide evidence challenging the commonly held notion that these diseases are rare in Asia,” said Dr Abdullah Baqui of Johns Hopkins Bloom-berg School of Public Health, Baltimore.

source:timesofindia.indiatimes.com