World Health Organization urges European countries to enhance vaccination rate

Chisinau, 19 September /MOLDPRES/ - The World Health Organization (WHO) has urged the European countries’ authorities to focus their actions on enhancing the rate of vaccination, in order to prevent cases of falling sick with transmissible diseases.  

The request was made, given that WHO Europe Director of Programme Management and Director Health Emergencies and Communicable Diseases Nedret Emiroglu, at a plenary session on the carrying out of the European action plan on vaccines for 2015-2020, had said that “there is the risk for the European region not to eliminate measles and rubella till 2020 and not to achieve the goals of covering the immunization.”  

According to the Health, Labour and Social Protection Ministry, Moldova’s delegation at the session said that, in the last years, more new vaccines had been brought to Moldova. The last one is against the cervical cancer, included in the calendar of immunizations in late 2017.  

„The insufficient coverage of immunization in Moldova, including the cases of measles reported in 2018, threatens the status of eliminating measles from the country,” the head of the Moldovan delegation, Marcela Tirdea, said.

Statistics data shows that 37 cases of death from measles and 41,000 cases of falling sick with this disease had been registered in Europe in the first months of this year alone, with a significant increase against 2017, when about 24,000 cases were recorded.

As many as 282 cases of measles have been confirmed in Moldova since early 2018.

(Reporter N. Sandu, editor L. Alcaza)