1. Post-campaign coverage evaluation of a measles and rubella supplementary immunization activity in five districts in India, 2019-2020.
- Author
-
Thangaraj JWV, Prosperi C, Kumar MS, Hasan AZ, Kumar VS, Winter AK, Bansal AK, Chauhan SL, Grover GS, Jain AK, Kulkarni RN, Sharma SK, Soman B, Chaaithanya IK, Kharwal S, Mishra SK, Salvi NR, Sarmah NP, Sharma S, Varghese A, Sabarinathan R, Duraiswamy A, Rani DS, Kanagasabai K, Lachyan A, Gawali P, Kapoor M, Chonker SK, Sangal L, Mehendale SM, Sapkal GN, Gupta N, Hayford K, Moss WJ, and Murherkar MV
- Subjects
- Humans, Infant, Child, Adolescent, Cross-Sectional Studies, Measles Vaccine therapeutic use, Vaccination, Rubella Vaccine therapeutic use, India epidemiology, Immunization Programs, Measles prevention & control, Rubella prevention & control
- Abstract
Background: In alignment with the Measles and Rubella (MR) Strategic Elimination plan, India conducted a mass measles and rubella vaccination campaign across the country between 2017 and 2020 to provide a dose of MR containing vaccine to all children aged 9 months to 15 years. We estimated campaign vaccination coverage in five districts in India and assessed campaign awareness and factors associated with vaccination during the campaign to better understand reasons for not receiving the dose., Methods and Findings: Community-based cross-sectional serosurveys were conducted in five districts of India among children aged 9 months to 15 years after the vaccination campaign. Campaign coverage was estimated based on home-based immunization record or caregiver recall. Campaign coverage was stratified by child- and household-level risk factors and descriptive analyses were performed to assess reasons for not receiving the campaign dose. Three thousand three hundred and fifty-seven children aged 9 months to 15 years at the time of the campaign were enrolled. Campaign coverage among children aged 9 months to 5 years documented or by recall ranged from 74.2% in Kanpur Nagar District to 90.4% in Dibrugarh District, Assam. Similar coverage was observed for older children. Caregiver awareness of the campaign varied from 88.3% in Hoshiarpur District, Punjab to 97.6% in Dibrugarh District, Assam, although 8% of children whose caregivers were aware of the campaign were not vaccinated during the campaign. Failure to receive the campaign dose was associated with urban settings, low maternal education, and lack of school attendance although the associations varied by district., Conclusion: Awareness of the MR vaccination campaign was high; however, campaign coverage varied by district and did not reach the elimination target of 95% coverage in any of the districts studied. Areas with lower coverage among younger children must be prioritized by strengthening the routine immunization programme and implementing strategies to identify and reach under-vaccinated children., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright: © 2024 Thangaraj et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
- Published
- 2024
- Full Text
- View/download PDF