Injectable polio vaccine to be available in third quarter

According to the latest announcement from the Department of Preventive Medicine (Ministry of Health), the injectable polio vaccine (IPV) will be used in the expanded immunization program in Vietnam from the third quarter of 2016.

Medical staff advise on vaccination for children in Bac Giang province. (Photo: VNA)

Currently, with the trend of international integration and implementation of the Strategy "Ending and eradicating polio in the period 2013-2018" of the World Health Organization, Vietnam will introduce the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) into the expanded immunization program from the third quarter of 2016 in parallel with the use of the 2-type oral polio vaccine (type 1, type 3 - bOPV) to replace the 3-type oral polio vaccine (tOPV) to maintain the achievement of polio eradication.

Thus, in the period 2016-2020, expected to start from May 2016, the health sector will give children 3 doses of bOPV vaccine when they are 2, 3 and 4 months old along with Quinvaxem vaccine and 1 dose of IPV vaccine when they are 5 months old (starting from September 2016).

Children who have received 1, 2 or 3 doses of bOPV vaccine from May to September 2016 will receive a booster dose of IPV vaccine to ensure immunity against type 2 poliovirus.

Polio is an acute viral infection transmitted through the digestive tract caused by the poliovirus. The disease is a group A infectious disease in the Law on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases.

The disease is transmitted from person to person by infection with the polio virus, mainly in water and food contaminated with the feces of sick or healthy people carrying the polio virus. This is one of the infectious diseases that has a vaccine to prevent it.

Currently, wild poliovirus continues to circulate in some countries in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Cameroon... and even some countries that have eradicated polio have recorded isolated cases of wild poliovirus infection.

Therefore, the risk of polio returning and becoming an epidemic if vaccination is not well implemented is very high.

In Vietnam, in the years before the vaccine, there were large-scale polio epidemics in 1957-1959, with the polio incidence rate in 1959 being 126.4/100,000 people.

Since 1962, when Vietnam successfully produced Sabin live attenuated polio vaccine (OPV: Oral Polio Vaccine) using primary monkey kidney cell culture technology with the help and support of Soviet experts, the morbidity and mortality rates have decreased significantly and no epidemics have occurred.

Thanks to the implementation of polio vaccine in the Expanded Immunization Program in which over 95% of children received polio vaccine, Vietnam was recognized by the World Health Organization as having eliminated polio nationwide in 2000.

For nearly 15 years, Vietnam has continued to protect the achievements of polio eradication through good surveillance of acute flaccid paralysis (LMC) cases and maintaining the rate of taking 3 doses of OPV vaccine in routine immunization at over 95% nationwide. At the same time, to ensure maintaining a high rate of immunity in the community, Vietnam has proactively reviewed risk areas every year and organized supplementary OPV vaccination for children under 5 years old in high-risk areas.

The use of 3-type polio vaccine (type 1, type 2, type 3 - tOPV) in Vietnam has brought about the above great and important achievements.

In Vietnam, OPV vaccine has been used for more than 30 years and results show that tOPV vaccine is very safe.

Worldwide, a very small proportion of cases of paralytic poliomyelitis are caused by reactivated vaccine virus, mainly the type 2 poliovirus component of tOPV (less than 1 case per 10 million doses of vaccine administered).

Although this risk is very low, to ensure there are no more cases of polio, moving towards global polio eradication, the World Health Organization requires all countries to remove the type 2 poliovirus component from the tOPV vaccine./.

According to VIETNAM+