Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Overview

Vaccines are one of the most effective health interventions ever developed.

Each year, more than 100 million children are immunized against tuberculosis, polio, measles, and other diseases. But millions of other children, mostly in the world's poorest countries, are not immunized.

Immunization rates are rising.

Public and private groups from around the world have come together in an effort to eventually immunize all children. In 1999, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) was formed, and global immunization is now at an all-time high. But even today, 21 percent of children don’t have access to needed vaccines.

Every year, 2.4 million children die from preventable diseases despite the availability of effective vaccines.

Millions more survive, but they’re left severely impaired. The long-range effects of childhood illnesses hinder the ability of those who survive to become educated, work, or care for themselves or others. This puts a strain on their families and on the economies of developing countries.

Getting cost-effective vaccines to the people who need them is complicated.

Successfully delivering high-quality vaccines requires a comprehensive temperature-controlled delivery system called the "cold chain." Vaccines need to be transported at the correct temperature to prevent them from either freezing or being exposed to too much heat. But in many countries, it's difficult to ensure this type of transport from the airport to the children in the village who need the vaccines.

We believe that a coordinated effort to develop and distribute underused and new vaccines can save millions of lives.

Success will be achieved through the coordinated efforts of national governments, their global development partners, pharmaceutical companies, non-governmental organizations, community health workers, and parents.

Our goal is to increase the use of effective but underused vaccines and introduce new vaccines to prevent a total of 4 million deaths per year.

Next: Our Approach

We’re supporting efforts to protect children and help raise global immunization rates to 90 percent, lower deaths from measles by 90 percent, and make polio the second vaccine-preventable disease the world has eradicated. We’re also helping countries quickly adopt and introduce new vaccines.

We support our partners—such as GAVI, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and Agence de Médecine Preventive—who are working to help countries vaccinate more of their children, introduce new and underused vaccines, eradicate polio, and control measles using the following strategies:

Help immunization programs vaccinate target populations quickly and efficiently:

• Revamp the “cold chain” delivery system to make it more effective in delivering vaccines.
• Vaccinate more children of all ages with the proper vaccines.
• Reach less accessible populations isolated by geography, culture, and religious practices.
• Promote the development of new technologies that will make vaccines easier to store, safer to deliver, and less expensive.

Accelerate the introduction of new and underused vaccines.

To achieve this, we’re supporting countries’ efforts to study which vaccines are needed in local areas, develop a process for making decisions, and raise the public and private resources needed to purchase and deliver these vaccines. We also provide support to develop low-cost methods of manufacturing the vaccines, obtain them from the manufacturers, and bring them to market as quickly as possible.

Eradicate polio and improve efforts to control measles.

We’re supporting the development and implementation of activities that complement Global Polio Eradication Initiative efforts, and we’re continuing to fund research and product development to achieve this goal. We are also evaluating new measles vaccines and identifying the best ways to invest in successful measles control.

Advocate for immunization programs.

We’re helping to develop “immunization champions”—people who can communicate educational messages about the benefits of immunization—in developing countries.