From CARICOM TODAY

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – The Trinidad-based Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) is urging regional countries to increase their efforts to keep children and other at-risk groups healthy by getting them vaccinated.

“Recent outbreaks of measles in North America have re-emphasized the importance of maintaining vaccination coverage at 95 per cent or more in all countries in the Caribbean Community,” said CARPHA chief executive director Dr. C. James Hospedales.

In a message in recognition of Vaccination Week in the Americas (VWA), Dr. Hospedales warned that if people are not vaccinated, they could become infected from a traveler or while traveling themselves.

The Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) is the new single regional public health agency for the Caribbean. It was legally established in July 2011 by an Inter-governmental Agreement signed by Caribbean Member States and began operation in January 2013. The Agency rationalises public health arrangements in the Region by combining the functions of five Caribbean Regional Health Institutions (RHIs) into a single agency. They are: The Caribbean Environmental Health Institute (CEHI); The Caribbean Epidemiology Centre (CAREC); The Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute (CFNI); The Caribbean Health Research Council (CHRC); The Caribbean Regional Drug Testing Laboratory (CRDTL). CARPHA brings these RHIs together as one strong force under a public health umbrella where issues requiring a regional response can be addressed.

CARPHA said though vaccination has led to a dramatic decline in the number of cases of several infectious diseases in the Caribbean, it has been estimated that around 10 per cent of the population has not been immunized with the most relevant vaccines.

Health programmes in the region provide vaccines against life-threatening diseases, including polio, measles and influenza. These vaccines have protected families from illness and saved thousands of lives. As a result of high vaccination rates, countries in the Caribbean region are in the forefront in controlling and eliminating vaccine-preventable diseases.

The region was the first in the world to eradicate smallpox in 1971 and to eliminate polio in 1994 and has not had any endemic transmission of measles since 2002. Other vaccine-preventable diseases, including diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, have also been substantially reduced throughout the hemisphere. New vaccines such as Rotavirus or HPV vaccine have been successfully included in the vaccination schedule of many of the countries of the Caribbean Region.
“CARPHA continues to promote and support regional strategic vaccination planning. The Agency is engaged in monitoring activities such as laboratory surveillance and evaluation,” said Dr. Babatunde Olowokure, Director of Surveillance, Disease Prevention and Control.

He said CARPHA is also “actively working with partners regionally and internationally to achieve timely, complete, regular and accurate surveillance for existing communicable diseases with active case finding, to ensure that sustained local transmission of disease such as measles and rubella does not occur following importation”.
IMAGE: Dr. C. James Hospedales, Chief Executive Director, CARPHA
For more on this story go to: http://today.caricom.org/2015/04/28/carpha-urges-caribbean-countries-to-ensure-vaccination-of-their-citizens/