A baby receives polio vaccince under the National Expanded Programme for Immunisation at a health clinic. — Photo MoH

HÀ NỘI – The Ministry of Health (MoH) has introduced several new vaccines in the National Expanded Programme on Immunisation in an effort to improve the efficiency of disease prevention, the Preventive Health Department has reported.
According to the ministry, due to the high risk of disease outbreak, especially infectious diseases, inoculation campaigns to administer free Japanese encephalitis B injections and the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) to children under the age of five are planned.
Meanwhile, measles and rubella vaccination campaigns benefitted nearly 20 million children aged 14 and under, and was recently extended to 16- and 17-year-olds, thus helping to contain the spread of disease.
As scheduled, the Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) will be put to use in 2017, while the use of a vaccine against Rota virus will begin in 2018.
The MoH said that the free provision of new vaccines is an effort to promote sustainable disease prevention towards wiping out dangerous infectious diseases.
The health sector will continue its research in order to add new vaccines, such as dengue fever and avian influenza H5N1 vaccines, to the national vaccination campaigns, the ministry said.
Along with these efforts, the ministry also worked with the military-run telecommunication group Viettel on a project to build software for national vaccination information management.
This enables medical workers to keep a close watch on and summarise the vaccination time table of patients, thus ensuring vaccinations are on schedule and simultaneously improving the efficiency of State management in the field.
The software has been piloted in the northern province of Bắc Ninh and Hà Nội. The next beneficiaries will be HCM City and Đà Nẵng.
Over 700 districts with more than 11,000 communes and wards are expected to benefit from the project when the software is deployed nationwide.

In another development, HCM City said the city would provide 20,000 additional doses of five-in-one Pentaxim to children aged two months to two years, beginning on May 11.

The city’s Department of Health has worked with the Viettel Group in addition to Việt Nam Post and Telecommunications to set up two phone lines 1080 and 1068 for registration.

The registration will start on May 10, one day before the vaccines are scheduled to be given at clinics. The operators will receive the registration over a 24-hour period.

The vaccine protects children from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio and Haemophilus influenza type B. — VNS