{"id":21101,"date":"2019-11-12T12:46:53","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T20:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/when-countries-get-wealthier-kids-can-lose-out-on-vaccines\/"},"modified":"2019-11-12T12:46:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T20:46:53","slug":"when-countries-get-wealthier-kids-can-lose-out-on-vaccines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/when-countries-get-wealthier-kids-can-lose-out-on-vaccines\/","title":{"rendered":"When Countries Get Wealthier, Kids Can Lose Out On Vaccines"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Pien Huang<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n Mothers and their babies in Nigeria wait at a health center that provides vaccinations against polio. Vaccination rates lag in the middle-income country.<\/p>\n

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Hannibal Hanschke\/Picture Alliance\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Hannibal Hanschke\/Picture Alliance\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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You’d think that as a poor country grows wealthier, more of its children would get vaccinated for preventable diseases such as polio, measles and pneumonia.<\/p>\n

But a review published in Nature<\/a> this month offers a different perspective.<\/p>\n

“The countries that are really poor get a lot of support for the vaccinations. The countries that are really rich can afford to pay for the vaccines anyway,” says Beate Kampmann<\/a>, director of the Vaccine Centre<\/a> at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and author of the review. <\/p>\n

But, she says, “the middle-income countries are in a tricky situation because they don’t qualify for support, yet they don’t necessarily have the financial resources and stability to purchase the vaccines.”<\/p>\n

Adrien de Chaisemartin, director of strategy and performance at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance<\/a>, agrees: “More and more vulnerable populations live in middle-income countries.” Gavi, an international nonprofit that helps buy and distribute vaccines, projects that 70% of the world’s under-immunized children will live in middle-income countries by 2030.<\/p>\n

Brazil, India, Indonesia and Nigeria were among the 10 countries<\/a> with the most children who lacked basic vaccinations in 2018 \u2014 for example, shots to prevent diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis by age 1. Each of those countries meets the World Bank’s definition of a middle-income country: an average annual income (known as the gross national income, or GNI, per capita) between $1,026 and $12,375. In Nigeria alone, 3 million kids are undervaccinated. That’s 15% of the world’s total of children who lack key vaccinations.<\/p>\n