CHILDREN have been dying and resources wasted because for decades the World
Health Organization has accepted information about vaccination coverage that鈥檚
often unreliable and sometimes wildly wrong.
Occasionally vaccinations are recorded more than once, says Anthony Burton of
the vaccines division of the WHO in Geneva. 鈥淚f your data are over-reported, you
may not be paying attention to a problem area and kids who normally would have
got vaccinated will get a disease and die,鈥� he says.
Burton and his colleagues at WHO and UNICEF analysed vaccination data for the
past 20 years. 鈥淲e discovered that 25 per cent of data were simply missing and
19 per cent were 鈥榦utliers鈥�,鈥� Burton says. Outliers have 鈥渟omething funny about
them鈥�, such as unusual jumps or inconsistencies.
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For example, they found that 106 per cent of children in Bangladesh were
given the third dose of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine (DTP3) in one
year. In Sierra Leone, take-up supposedly jumped from 28 per cent to 68 per cent
between 1997 and 1998, despite a civil war.
And the problem isn鈥檛 limited to developing countries. Curiously, the review
found that there was no data from Norway.
鈥淣ational level immunisation coverage values are a myth,鈥� says virologist T.
Jacob John, advisor to the Indian state of Kerala. He says that for 鈥測ear after
year鈥�, India reported vaccinating hundreds of thousands more children against
polio than the number of doses the country purchased.
What鈥檚 more, independent experts say this has been going on since the 1970s.
鈥淓verybody knows about it,鈥� says Pierre Claquin, an epidemiologist working in
Bangladesh. There the reported figure for measles immunisation in 1999 was 96
per cent, as compared with 61 per cent from an independent survey, he says. 鈥淭oo
often in the past health workers were threatened by punishment if they did not
meet targets.鈥�
The WHO and UNICEF are now preparing revised estimates after re-analysing and
comparing the data with independent surveys. 鈥淎s of now, we are reserving the
right to disagree with the country submitting the data,鈥� Burton says.