On hepatitis B vaccination
The Union ministry of health and family welfare needs to rethink its plan to introduce hepatitis b vaccination as part of the universal immunisation programme in the country. Does India really need it? For one, the vaccination protocol is faulty. Secondly, the real incidence of the disease is much lower than suggested. The decision to introduce the vaccine is based on the calculation that 250,000 people die each year of Hepatitis b infection. But local data available through the Indian Council of Medical Research's (icmr) National Cancer Registry Programme suggests this is a gross exaggeration: the number of deaths is about 5,000. In other words, a cost-benefit analysis does not justify the vaccine's introduction.
What is the source of the inflated calculation? A paper by Mark Miller and L McCann, Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies, National Institutes of Health, usa published in a 2000 issue of the journal Health Economics. It uses worst-case scenario data from Taiwan and so makes projections for India.
The group's response drew a reply from the paper's authors. They had used a model, based on assumptions derived from previously published studies on diverse populations. Lack of sufficient country-specific data, the authors said, was one of the problems in being exact.
Countered the St Stephen's group: there was sufficient data, at least for cancer. icmr had painstakingly collected it. Miller got back again. The calculation they'd made in the paper, he now defended, included diseases other than liver cancer!
Good point. But where was the icmr in all this? During the entire process -- from publication to planning to the decision taken -- why could this apex research organisation not intervene with the data it had?
And, could we not depend on outside experts for health programmes the country runs?
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