Recommend taking children to get Quinvaxem vaccination instead of waiting for service vaccine

The Department of Preventive Medicine, Ministry of Health has just announced that the Ministry of Health is concerned about the fact that some mothers do not take their children for vaccination because they are waiting for service vaccines in the shortage of 5-in-1 and 6-in-1 service vaccines (to prevent diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, Hib meningitis, hepatitis B).

More than 31 thousand children vaccinated with 5-in-1 vaccine in Nghe An, 01 child had a reaction - Photo: Thanh Chung

This situation makes the risk of disease outbreaks very high, especially diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough...

Faced with the above situation, the Ministry of Health recommends that parents should take their children for full and timely vaccinations to prevent diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus... at 2, 3, 4 months of age because this is the "golden" time for vaccines to maximize their effect in protecting children's health.

Parents should not miss the opportunity to vaccinate their children because of waiting for a vaccine service, endangering their children's lives and threatening the spread of disease in the community. Fully vaccinating children on schedule is the social responsibility of every citizen.

The 3-dose Quinvaxem vaccination schedule is at 2, 3 and 4 months of age. If any dose of vaccine is missed or given late, it needs to be re-injected at a later time. The minimum interval between injections is 1 month.

Children who have received the first and second doses of the service vaccine but have not received enough doses can return to receive Quinvaxem vaccine.

Currently, Quinvaxem vaccine is fully provided at about 12,000 expanded vaccination and service vaccination points nationwide.

The Department of Preventive Medicine emphasized that in Vietnam, recently, due to concerns about post-vaccination reactions, some families in Hanoi did not take their children for vaccination, causing a whooping cough outbreak in the city, including one death.

In addition, there are other lessons such as measles in 2014, diphtheria epidemic that killed 3 people in Quang Nam in 2015 were all due to lack of vaccination.

Meanwhile, when the disease breaks out again, all those who are not immune because they have not had the disease before and have not been fully vaccinated can get infected. Adults of any age can get the disease, not just unvaccinated children.

Typically, in England in 1974, controversy over vaccine side effects caused vaccination to be suspended, resulting in an epidemic that affected over 100,000 children, causing the deaths of 31 children.

In 1975 in Japan, when the whole-cell pertussis vaccine was temporarily suspended to investigate deaths, an epidemic occurred in over 13,000 children, of whom 113 died.

Recently, measles outbreaks in the US and diphtheria outbreaks in Laos were also due to parents' negligence in not vaccinating their children.

In the 20th century, expanded vaccination was ranked 4th in the 10 greatest achievements in public health according to the ranking of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The World Health Organization (WHO) considers vaccination to be one of the most effective health interventions.

According to statistics, every 20 seconds a child dies from a disease that can be prevented by vaccines. Thus, vaccines help children prevent diseases, reduce the burden of disease costs for families and society, prevent the risk of spreading epidemics, and protect public health.../.

According to Vietnam+