Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Nov - Dec Vol. 9 No.6 | Page 34

Health
2014 Gates Vaccine Innovation Award Winner:
Agence de Médecine Préventive
By Orin Levine

Dr. Sotlié, a District Medical Officer of Adjame-Plateau-Attecoube and
a team of health workers during an immunization session at the medical
outpost of the Adjamé district, Côte d’Ivoire. Photo Credit: AMP

History is shaped by innovation and human ingenuity.
From light bulbs to laptops, each major breakthrough has
changed the way we live – and in many cases made our
world a healthier place. Vaccines are a perfect example of
this.
In 1796, Edward Jenner announced a novel vaccine that
would go on to eradicate smallpox from the planet; and in
the 1950s, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed the first
two vaccines to fight the scourge of polio. Soon, polio will
be consigned to history as well. These innovators laid the
foundation for future efforts to help prevent the spread of
some of the world’s deadliest diseases.
However, these life-saving tools can’t benefit people around
the world if they’re sitting on a shelf. Vaccines need systems
and people in-place to safely and reliably deliver them to
the communities who need them. The Gates Foundation
created the Gates Vaccine Innovation Award to honor
innovations that enable this critical work.
We are excited to celebrate one of those innovations by
announcing Agence de Médecine Préventive (AMP) as the
2014 Gates Vaccine Innovation Award for EPIVAC, an
on-the-job training program for district medical officers
(DMOs) to improve immunization program performance
in 11 Francophone African countries.
Vaccines protect children for a lifetime from debilitating
diseases. By improving health programs at the local level,
EPIVAC is helping ensure children receive the life-saving
vaccines they need.Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation.
EPIVAC blends classroom and field work to strengthen
DMOs project management capacity. While students work
toward their master’s degree in public health management
or applied vaccinology, they continue to work on the
ground. This allows them to continue to provide critical
life-saving health services to their communities and apply
lessons in real time.

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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • November - December 2014

EPIVAC graduates are unsung heroes of global
immunization efforts. Due to their leadership, community
health workers are further empowered to reach children
with lifesaving vaccines. In fact, each EPIVAC graduate
serves an average of 30,000-200,000 people, which means
EPIVAC graduates have positively impacted an estimated
6 million lives. Further, data shows that districts with
EPIVAC graduates have significantly higher immunization
coverage than those without.
EPIVAC is a model program that helps vaccines make
it the final mile to the children who need them most.
Worldwide, more than 22 million children still don’t
receive the vaccines they need, and 1.5 million children die
from vaccine-preventable diseases. EPIVAC is helping to
reduce these numbers each day, and history will mark it as
having made a real and lasting impact on the communities
its graduates serve.
We have the tools we need to prevent diseases like measles,
pneumonia and rotavirus, but we are still striving to ensure
that every child, no matter where they live, has access to
vaccines. Now, we need more programs like EPIVAC to
help ensure our past innovations can help today’s children
live long and healthy lives well into the future.
Officials: Number of New Ebola Cases in W. Africa
Declining
By Zlatica Hoke
The good news from West Africa began trickling in last
week.
The Ebola coordinator at the Guinean Health Ministry
said on November 5 in Paris that the numbers of new cases
are declining in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Guinean Health Ministry official Aboubakar Sidiki Diakite
said, “The figures are declining because the number of
confirmed cases that we had in health care centers, the
number also of suspected cases that we had in health care
centers, these figures are starting to decline - not in a
very significant way, but we realize that these figures are
decreasing.”
In Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, a United Nations official in
charge of emergency Ebola response confirmed there has
been a significant improvement in the fight against the
deadly disease.
Fewer people are getting infected and fewer are dying from
it. But the battle against Ebola is far from over, warned the
U.N. official, Anthony Banbury.
“We need NGOs and others to come in and run these
facilities. We are putting in place the logistics capabilities.
We are building the care centers. We are getting the
equipment, everything we need to go in them,” Banbury
said.
“The patients are there in far too great numbers. What we