How many vaccines do you think it takes to fully immunise a child? One? Three? Perhaps five? By the World Health Organization's reckoning, that number is 11-that's 11 key vaccines every child should have to protect them from a range of devastating diseases. So why then are we only using three to measure immunisation coverage? By doing so, we are not only giving ourselves a skewed perspective of the state of global childhood immunisation, but we are also in danger of thinking it's job done, when we still have far to go. At first glance, it appears that we have almost won this particular health battle, with the proportion of the world's children receiving routine vaccinations climbing steadily from 73 per cent a decade ago to about 83 per cent today. But that's only when you measure the uptake of three basic childhood vaccines, completed on the third dose of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP).
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