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Ethiopia has started a campaign to immunise hundreds of thousands of children against pneumococcal disease
Ethiopia has started a campaign to immunise hundreds of thousands of children against pneumococcal disease - the largest introduction of pneumococcal vaccines in a developing country to date, the GAVI Alliance said on Monday.
The disease, which can cause a range of infections from relatively mild ear infection to potentially life-threatening illnesses such as pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis, kills up to 1 million children under the age of 5 every year.
Ethiopia's health ministry began the campaign on Sunday, as part of its national immunisation programme.
"One of the major contributors to child death is pneumonia and the introduction of pneumococcal vaccine will help us cut child death further and achieve MDG 4 by 2015," Ethiopia's health minister, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement.
MDG 4 refers to the Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.
GAVI Alliance, a public-private partnership, was launched in 2000 to fund vaccines for children in the world's 70 poorest countries.
To date, 15 countries have started the introduction of the latest generation pneumococcal vaccines as part of their national immunisation programmes, GAVI said.
Those countries which have introduced the pneumococcal vaccine with GAVI funding are: Nicaragua, Kenya, Guyana, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Honduras, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Central African Republic, Gambia, Benin, Cameroon, Rwanda, Burundi and now, Ethiopia.
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