• Submitted by: manso
• Society
• 05 / 01 / 2011

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HAVANA, Cuba, Apr 30 (acn) Dr. Mauricio Landaverde, Regional Advisor of the Pan-American

Health Organization (PAHO), asserted on Friday that Cuba has a high quality immunization program, due to its total vaccination coverage and to the care and love with which it’s carried out.

During the establishment of the National Committee of Experts for the Documentation and Verification of the Elimination of Measles, German measles and the Congenital Rubella Syndrome in The Americas, the expert expressed his admiration for the island’s efforts to protect children.

This group is headed by Dr. Miguel Angel Galindo, a founder of the National Immunization Program, and made up by Professor Evelio Cabezas, Drs. Berta Lidia Castro, Mabel Gonzalez and Angela Ribas, and graduate Liudmila Egües.
Landaverde clarified that they will check the vaccination program and will examine evidence on epidemiological vigilance as well as the quality with which samples are analyzed at labs in Cuba.

Once collected they will write down these data in a way that, when the international commission created for the American continent revises them, they will testify to their veracity, he stressed.

For being a tropical country where the polio virus doesn’t circulate and for the excellent quality of the Cuban health system, the PAHO asked the island for help in these research works, which will contribute to protect children once this disease is eliminated in the world, he underlined.

Dr. Lea Guido, representative of the Pan-American and World health organizations in Havana, reiterated that the island is an example in terms of its immunization program and that the country has been certified as a territory Free of Poliomyelitis, which it eradicated since 1962.
   In Cuba, 11 vaccines protect children against 13 diseases, which made it possible to close 2010 with an infant mortality rate of 4.5 per every 1,000 live births, the lowest in the region, even lower than that of the United States.
   Dr. Luis Estruch, Deputy Minister for Epidemiology of the Cuban Public Health Ministry, explained that the Caribbean island’s vaccination program covers from 98 to 100 percent of children, which has made it possible to have 28 transmissible diseases under control.