Sustaining Effective Social Programs: in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Viet Nam

Abstract

One of the outstanding successes in public health in developing countries during the past 20 years has been the advent of widespread child and maternal immunization. In the early 1970s across Asia and the Pacific, the proportion of children who were immunized (known as vaccination coverage) was less than 10 percent. In 1976, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), with the aim to control six childhood diseases. Since then, child vaccination coverage has increased to more than 80 percent. This remarkable increase has resulted in significant reductions in child mortality and morbidity. For example, the annual number of measles cases in Viet Nam decreased from 82,000 in 1985 to 6,500 in 1997.