Blog 9 Extra Credit: What is Happening Outside of COVID-19?

As a result of the fear of spreading the coronavirus, many countries and agencies have halted their mass vaccination programs in an effort to meet social distancing guidelines. While this is great in the initiative for stopping the coronavirus, this opens up a very serious problem in the eradication of other diseases. In these mass vaccination events, children in developing nations are given vaccinations for measles and poliovirus. Already in many of these countries, outbreaks of measles and poliovirus are commonplace, making the need for vaccination so important. Thus, if mass vaccination programs decide to halt their services, it is entirely likely that citizens of these nations will begin to face an increasing number of serious outbreaks of the virus, pushing the dates of eradication of these viruses way into the future.

Some infectious disease experts even suggest that eradication will never occur unless a better method for vaccination is created. However, this is a problem because funding is often lacking for these projects. For example, a skin patch containing the vaccine for measles was created to help reduce the difficulties surrounding administering the vaccine and make it easier for more children to be vaccinated. However, this project has not really left the ground due to a lack of funding. This will be an important initiative to take because the vaccination has to be prepared and administered by a qualified health care worker, stored in a 2-8℃ climate, and can be expensive to administer. In fact, in the DRC, a nation with mass vaccination programs in place, only 57% of children are receiving the vaccine. For herd immunity to be effective and control the spread of the virus, at least 92-95% of the population needs to be vaccinated. Most children are also only given a single dose of the vaccination, which is more effective than receiving nothing, but the greatest level of immunity is given by a second dose. Considering how infectious measles is, eradication efforts are nowhere near where they need to be to actually eradicate the virus. This is a problem because measles poses significant risks to the population in developing nations. The mortality rate is often around 3-6%, and can even reach 30% in a bad outbreak. Measles also leaves children at risk of a variety of other problems due to clearing of the memory of the immune response.

While it is definitely important to help halt the spread of the coronavirus, especially in nations with underdeveloped healthcare programs, it is important to realize what consequences these actions might impose in the future. In the next year or so, as the coronavirus begins to slow, other dangerous infectious diseases, such as poliovirus and measles, could begin to pick back up. It is understandable why these mass vaccination programs are beginning to stop, but instead of completing pulling these programs, perhaps it could be beneficial to develop other ways to administer these vaccines on a large scale. Otherwise, eventual eradication of these diseases seems almost impossible. If these efforts stop, poliovirus and measles will continue to kill hundreds of thousands of people. In 2018 alone, measles killed an estimated 140,000, which will most likely see an increase due to the pandemic. Thus, it is entirely important to remain aware and continue to make efforts to reduce the effects of these viruses.