Vaccination in India includes the use of vaccines in Indian public health and the place of vaccines in Indian society, policy, and research.
Vaccination in India includes the use of vaccines in Indian public health and the place of vaccines in Indian society, policy, and research.
India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) began in 1985. The UIP covers: [1] [2] [3]
India has been vaccinating against coronavirus since 16 January 2021.
India's implementation of the rotavirus vaccine in its Universal Immunisation Programme has saved many children's lives. [4]
Nearly every child in every country globally experiences at least one rotavirus infection in early childhood. [5] However, in India, children are more likely to get this infection multiple times, and children in India are more likely to die from it. [5]
A rotavirus vaccine is available. [5] This vaccine is highly effective and has been preventing half of the severe rotovirus diarrhea cases which would occur in India otherwise. [5] Scientists in India produce vaccines for this disease which are special for India only. [5]
As of 2019 the Indian government is scaling up efforts to promote the HPV vaccine for girls to prevent cervical cancer. [6] This effort began in 2008 with the introduction of one sort of vaccine and in 2018 the government began providing a newer version of the vaccine. [6]
Cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in India mainly occur in North India in the winter. [7] This virus causes lower respiratory tract infection. [7]
India, like many other countries, uses the World Health Organization system for reporting and classifying "Adverse Events following Immunization". [8] The government agency which manages this program is responsible for both increasing safety and giving an explanation if a problem occurs. [9] Between 2012 and 2016, the system identified about 1000 cases. [10] Researchers responded by examining these cases to improve safety. [10]
In 1802 a 3-year-old girl in Mumbai received a smallpox vaccine, making her the first person to take a vaccine in India. [11] The British government claimed success and began to block use of the previous technology variolation to only recommend vaccination instead. [11] In hindsight, the situation was complicated because vaccines were the long-term solution but way that the British Raj introduced them was disruptive to how people accessed traditional health services, and to government operations, and in religion. [12]
The pharmaceutical industry in India is strong and has a reputation for producing good vaccines for sale and export. [13] Typically when a country makes vaccines, that means that local people have good access to them. [13] For various reasons, India has both a strong vaccine manufacturing sector and also people in India, especially children, have higher rates of missing vaccines than in comparable countries. [13]
Various commentators have given different reasons for why India has less vaccination. [13] One historic reason is that India has contributed intensely to encouraging vaccines for smallpox and polio at the expense of being able to promote other vaccines. [13] Another explanation could be that the Indian government underspends on vaccines in general. [13] Somehow India's population does not demand vaccines, which could be a result of lack of public health education. [13] India also has pseudoscience activists promoting vaccine hesitancy. [13]
Some research has suggested that community engagement (CE) may be especially important to consider in supporting vaccination in India. This may include "[efforts that are] focused on upstream relationships (bidirectional), fostering trust, transparent communication, capacity building, and political will to ensure such approaches." [14] There appears to be overarching support for vaccination CE among decisionmakers in India, but there remain many structural and social barriers to moving forward on this front. [15]
There has been a dengue vaccine available since 2015. [16] However, this vaccine is not effective in many cases. [16] The Indian government participates in the global research to develop an effective general use dengue vaccine. [16]
There is research for a kala azar (Leishmaniasis) vaccine in India, but none exists.
Foreign tourists visiting India contribute significantly to India's economy. [17] People who visit India from countries with different diseases may not have vaccines to protect against infections in India. [17] When tourists do get an infection in India, often that infection could have been prevented with a vaccine. [17] [18]
The World Health Organization recommends different vaccines for tourists in different circumstances. [17] Those vaccines include diphtheria vaccine, tetanus vaccine, hepatitis A vaccine, hepatitis B vaccine, oral polio vaccine, typhoid vaccine, varicella vaccine, Japanese encephalitis, meningococcal vaccine, rabies vaccine, and yellow fever vaccine. [17]
Vaccination is the administration of a vaccine to help the immune system develop immunity from a disease. Vaccines contain a microorganism or virus in a weakened, live or killed state, or proteins or toxins from the organism. In stimulating the body's adaptive immunity, they help prevent sickness from an infectious disease. When a sufficiently large percentage of a population has been vaccinated, herd immunity results. Herd immunity protects those who may be immunocompromised and cannot get a vaccine because even a weakened version would harm them. The effectiveness of vaccination has been widely studied and verified. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases; widespread immunity due to vaccination is largely responsible for the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of diseases such as polio and tetanus from much of the world. However, some diseases, such as measles outbreaks in America, have seen rising cases due to relatively low vaccination rates in the 2010s – attributed, in part, to vaccine hesitancy. According to the World Health Organization, vaccination prevents 3.5–5 million deaths per year.
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and recognize further and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection that applies only to contagious diseases. It occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, that the communicable pathogen cannot maintain itself in the population, its low incidence thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity.
Rotaviruses are the most common cause of diarrhoeal disease among infants and young children. Nearly every child in the world is infected with a rotavirus at least once by the age of five. Immunity develops with each infection, so subsequent infections are less severe. Adults are rarely affected. Rotavirus is a genus of double-stranded RNA viruses in the family Reoviridae. There are nine species of the genus, referred to as A, B, C, D, F, G, H, I and J. Rotavirus A is the most common species, and these rotaviruses cause more than 90% of rotavirus infections in humans.
This is a timeline of the development of prophylactic human vaccines. Early vaccines may be listed by the first year of development or testing, but later entries usually show the year the vaccine finished trials and became available on the market. Although vaccines exist for the diseases listed below, only smallpox has been eliminated worldwide. The other vaccine-preventable illnesses continue to cause millions of deaths each year. Currently, polio and measles are the targets of active worldwide eradication campaigns.
Vaccine hesitancy is a delay in acceptance, or refusal, of vaccines despite the availability of vaccine services and supporting evidence. The term covers refusals to vaccinate, delaying vaccines, accepting vaccines but remaining uncertain about their use, or using certain vaccines but not others. Although adverse effects associated with vaccines are occasionally observed, the scientific consensus that vaccines are generally safe and effective is overwhelming. Vaccine hesitancy often results in disease outbreaks and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. Therefore, the World Health Organization characterizes vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten global health threats.
Immunization during pregnancy is the administration of a vaccine to a pregnant individual. This may be done either to protect the individual from disease or to induce an antibody response, such that the antibodies cross the placenta and provide passive immunity to the infant after birth. In many countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, vaccination against influenza, COVID-19 and whooping cough is routinely offered during pregnancy.
An attenuated vaccine is a vaccine created by reducing the virulence of a pathogen, but still keeping it viable. Attenuation takes an infectious agent and alters it so that it becomes harmless or less virulent. These vaccines contrast to those produced by "killing" the pathogen.
Hepatitis B vaccine is a vaccine that prevents hepatitis B. The first dose is recommended within 24 hours of birth with either two or three more doses given after that. This includes those with poor immune function such as from HIV/AIDS and those born premature. It is also recommended that health-care workers be vaccinated. In healthy people, routine immunization results in more than 95% of people being protected.
A vaccination policy is a health policy adopted in order to prevent the spread of infectious disease. These policies are generally put into place by state or local governments, but may also be set by private facilities, such as workplaces or schools. Many policies have been developed and implemented since vaccines were first made widely available.
The rotavirus vaccine is a vaccine used to protect against rotavirus infections, which are the leading cause of severe diarrhea among young children. The vaccines prevent 15–34% of severe diarrhea in the developing world and 37–96% of the risk of death among young children due to severe diarrhea. Immunizing babies decreases rates of disease among older people and those who have not been immunized.
The 1974 smallpox epidemic in India infected 188,000 people, leading to the deaths of 31,000 Indians.
Chandrakant Lahariya is an Indian medical doctor, public health & policy expert and writer.
Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) is a vaccination programme launched by the Government of India in 1985. It became a part of Child Survival and Safe Motherhood Programme in 1992 and is currently one of the key areas under the National Health Mission since 2005. The programme now consists of vaccination for 12 diseases- tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, poliomyelitis, measles, hepatitis B, rotaviral gastroenteritis, Japanese encephalitis, rubella, pneumonia and Pneumococcal diseases. Hepatitis B and Pneumococcal diseases were added to the UIP in 2007 and 2017 respectively. The cost of all the vaccines are borne entirely by the Government of India and is funded through taxes with a budget of ₹7,234 crore (US$870 million) in 2022 and the program covers all residents of India, including foreign residents.
Mission Indradhanush is a health mission of the Government of India. It was launched by Union Health Minister J. P. Nadda on 25 December 2014. The scheme this seeks to drive towards 90% full immunisation coverage of India and sustain the same by year 2022. Vaccination is being provided against eight vaccine-preventable diseases nationally, i.e. Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Tetanus, Polio, Measles, severe form of Childhood Tuberculosis and Hepatitis B and meningitis & pneumonia caused by Haemophilus influenza type B; and against Rotavirus Diarrhea and Japanese Encephalitis in selected states and districts respectively.
Inoculation is the act of implanting a pathogen or other microbe or virus into a person or other organism. It is a method of artificially inducing immunity against various infectious diseases. The term "inoculation" is also used more generally to refer to intentionally depositing microbes into any growth medium, as into a Petri dish used to culture the microbe, or into food ingredients for making cultured foods such as yoghurt and fermented beverages such as beer and wine. This article is primarily about the use of inoculation for producing immunity against infection. Inoculation has been used to eradicate smallpox and to markedly reduce other infectious diseases such as polio. Although the terms "inoculation", "vaccination", and "immunization" are often used interchangeably, there are important differences. Inoculation is the act of implanting a pathogen or microbe into a person or other recipient; vaccination is the act of implanting or giving someone a vaccine specifically; and immunization is the development of disease resistance that results from the immune system's response to a vaccine or natural infection.
Ring vaccination is a strategy to inhibit the spread of a disease by vaccinating those who are most likely to be infected.
Vaccination in Brazil includes all the practice and social issues related to vaccines in Brazil.
Shabir Ahmed Madhi, is a South African physician who is professor of vaccinology and director of the South African Medical Research Council Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Technology Research Chair in Vaccine Preventable Diseases. In January 2021, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Trudy Virginia Noller Murphy is an American pediatric infectious diseases physician, public health epidemiologist and vaccinologist. During the 1980s and 1990s, she conducted research at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas on three bacterial pathogens: Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus), and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Murphy's studies advanced understanding of how these organisms spread within communities, particularly among children attending day care centers. Her seminal work on Hib vaccines elucidated the effects of introduction of new Hib vaccines on both bacterial carriage and control of invasive Hib disease. Murphy subsequently joined the National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where she led multi-disciplinary teams in the Divisions of Epidemiology and Surveillance and The Viral Hepatitis Division. Among her most influential work at CDC was on Rotashield™, which was a newly licensed vaccine designed to prevent severe diarrheal disease caused by rotavirus. Murphy and her colleagues uncovered that the vaccine increased the risk of acute bowel obstruction (intussusception). This finding prompted suspension of the national recommendation to vaccinate children with Rotashield, and led the manufacturer to withdraw the vaccine from the market. For this work Murphy received the United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary's Award for Distinguished Service in 2000, and the publication describing this work was recognized in 2002 by the Charles C. Shepard Science Award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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