Disease prevention is the key to public health. It is always better to prevent a disease than to treat it. Vaccines prevent disease in the people who receive them and protect those who come into contact with unvaccinated individuals. Vaccines help prevent infectious diseases and save lives. Vaccines are responsible for the control of many infectious diseases that were once common in this country, including polio, measles, diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), rubella, mumps, tetanus, and haemphillus influenza. The government of Rwanda through the ministry of health is working hard to ensure safe guard the lives of children through vaccination programmes that prevent them from various desease infection. Few months back, the Ministry of Health in conjunction with Global Health partners administered the first dose of Pneumococcal vaccine to a Rwandan child at Ruhuha Health Centre, Eastern province. Vaccines are very effective in preventing death and disabilities due to certain contagious and viral diseases. They save enormous money in health related expenses and there fore contributes social and economic welfare of the citizens. In Rwanda, recently the program of pneumococal vaccine has been deployed in various parts of the country. Pneumococcal disease is the leading preventable killer of children under five. Parents from all around the country have been advised to take their children for regular immunisation as a way through which the fourth millennium development goal will be attained. A decision to vaccinate is a decision to safeguard and protect individuals and entire communities from diseases that spread through a person to person transmission. Where immunization programmes are targeted at total community immunity, the likelihood of transmission from an infected person to another is greatly diminished. Learning the causes for the infection and the spread of it helps in developing vaccines that can in the long run create immunization among humans. For example the best mode of preventing and reducing the severity of flu is a timely and regular development, proper disbursement and prompt administration of the influenza vaccine. Flu is the common sickness in our society and many people with their children would be willing to get protected from it. The influenza vaccine that is used each coming year is an inactivated trivalent vaccine, which means that the flu vaccine contains three inactivated flu viruses that is to say one influenza B and two influenza A strains. Because the currently available permitted vaccines are inactivated vaccines, the flu vaccine is incapable of causing the flu contrary to common misconceptions. The effectiveness and plausibility of the trivalent vaccine depends upon the match between the strains of influenza that are circulating and the viruses in the vaccine. Of course there is no guarantee that the strains selected for creating the vaccine will be the strains that go around during the following flu seasons, the match between the vaccine strain and the circulating strain being successful and good about more than 75% of the time. Parents are constantly concerned about the health and safety of their children and take many steps to protect them. These steps range from child proof door latches to child safety seats. In the same way, vaccines work to protect infants, children, and adults from illnesses and death caused by infectious diseases. Vaccine preventable diseases have a costly impact, resulting in doctor’s visits, hospitalizations, and premature deaths. Sick children can also cause parents to lose time from work. IT is true that newborn babies are immune to many diseases because they have antibodies they got from their mothers. However, the duration of this immunity may last only a month to about a year. Further, young children do not have maternal immunity against some vaccine-preventable diseases, such as whooping cough. If a child is not vaccinated and is exposed to a disease germ, the child’s body may not be strong enough to fight the disease. Before vaccines, many children died from diseases that vaccines now prevent, such as whooping cough, measles, and polio. Those same germs exist today, but babies are now protected by vaccines, so we do not see these diseases as often. Immunizing individual children also helps to protect the health of our community, especially those people who are not immunized. People who are not immunized include those who are too young to be vaccinated for example children less than a year old cannot receive the measles vaccine but can be infected by the measles virus. Even those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons such as children with leukemia, and those who cannot make an adequate response to vaccination. Also protected, therefore, are people who received a vaccine, but who have not developed immunity. In addition, people who are sick will be less likely to be exposed to disease germs that can be passed around by unvaccinated children. Immunization also slows down or stops disease outbreaks. The author is a medical doctor at Kanombe Military Hospital
