Education – VoICE

Possibilities: The Far-Reaching Benefits of Immunization

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The story of immunization is often headlined with the remarkable health benefits—millions of lives saved, and illnesses and hospitalizations prevented. But the true impact of vaccination is even more far-reaching, touching many areas of people’s lives from supporting early childhood growth and development to improving educational outcomes and productivity, promoting economic stability, and helping to address equity gaps: It’s seemingly impossible to undersell the importance of vaccination.

This World Immunization Week, the VoICE editors highlight some of the broader benefits of immunization—not only helping to prevent illness and save lives, but also promoting healthy development, productivity, economic stability, and equity for all.

Vaccination: Helping children think, learn and thrive

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A healthy child is more likely to attend school, performs better in school and attends school for longer than a child who is often ill or has suffered permanent disabilities as a result of illness. In this Feature, VoICE explores how vaccine-preventable infections affect cognitive development and schooling, and highlights evidence of the effect vaccination can have in protecting a child’s neurologic development, educational prospects and ultimately, future productivity.

Gender Equity and Vaccines: an equal shot at health

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Last month at the G7 meeting in Canada, global leaders met to consider gender equality, one of the 5 key themes Canada will advance during their tenure. Partners, experts and representatives in the immunization world echoed this emphasis on gender at the Global Immunization Meeting in Kigali, Rwanda just a few days ago. The issues of gender and gender equity within immunization are complex, and designing research to study equity gaps can be difficult. To understand what we do know about immunization and gender, women’s empowerment and gender equity, the VoICE team this month features an overview of these issues.