European Vaccination Week/ WHO, Unicef ​​and EU Commission: over 1.8 million measles prophylaxis lost during Covid | Healthcare24

In the three-year period 2020-2022, therefore coinciding with the pandemic, more than 1.8 million children in the European region of the World Health Organization (WHO) skipped vaccination against measles, with a consequent 60-fold increase in the number of measles cases in 2023 compared to 2022. The alarm was raised on the occasion of the European Vaccination Week by Henri Kluge, WHO Europe director,
Regina De Dominicis, director of Unicef ​​Europe and Central Asia and
Stella Kyriakides, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety. In the joint note the three underline how important it is not to retreat from the very important results obtained since 1974, when only 5% of the world’s children had been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, a percentage which has now risen to almost 85% of children worldwide and 94% in the WHO European Region thanks to the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) established exactly 50 years ago. Just five years after the introduction of Epi, smallpox was eradicated. Since then, the geographic range of the wild poliovirus has shrunk to just two countries, and the threat of several serious infectious diseases in children has declined dramatically. “Continuous innovation in the field of immunology has led to the development of vaccines capable of protecting against an even greater number of diseases – the three leaders point out – opening up the possibility in the European Region of eliminating hepatitis B and cervical cancer in the next future”.