Buenos Aires, November 29 (NA) – The Argentine Society of Pediatrics (SAP) has alerted about a historic drop in vaccination coverage in the country and warned that children's health is going through “one of the most severe crises in decades.” This conclusion was drawn after analyzing official data from the Ministry of Health and the Observatory of Childhood and Adolescence. According to the document, which the Argentine News Agency was able to access, the entity expressed “maximum concern” over the return of serious diseases and recalled that seven deaths from whooping cough have been registered in recent months. The report states that vaccination coverage has fallen to levels that risk herd immunity and enable the resurgence of previously controlled diseases. The sanitarian and emergency medicine specialist Eduardo Arellano, director of RCP Argentina, stated that the country is facing “a scenario of collective immunological fragility,” where the current figures “compromise individual immunity and public health as a whole.” He also added that the decline has a particularly strong impact on babies under 18 months, the group with the highest proportion of preventable hospitalizations and deaths. The expert linked the situation to the dismantling of the immunizations area of the Ministry of Health in the last two years. Among the factors mentioned are the elimination of territorial vaccination programs, the dismissal of 2,600 essential workers, including vaccination teams, sexual health, and prenatal care staff, and the lack of new purchases: the doses recently administered come from lots acquired during the previous administration. Arellano pointed out that Argentina went from having “one of the most complete vaccination calendars in the world, with 19 free and mandatory vaccines,” to facing active outbreaks and the return of diseases that were believed to be eradicated.
