In news : Recently, Prime Minister concerns on vaccine wastage emerging from the Covid-19 inoculation drive
What is vaccine wastage?
Vaccine wastage is an expected component of any large vaccination drive, and a vaccine is procured from the maker with an estimated wastage. But high vaccine wastage inflates vaccine demand and increases unnecessary procurement. India is witnessing a vaccine wastage of 6.5 per cent
Reasons for Vaccine wastages
It get wasted in the following ways
In Unopened Vials
- If the vaccine has crossed expiry date
- If it’s exposed to heat
- If the vaccine has been frozen Breakage
- Missing inventory and theft
In Opened Vials
- While discarding leftover doses
- Vials submerged in water
- Not able to draw out the number of doses
- Suspected contamination
- Poor vaccine administration
Different Stages Where Wastage Occurs
At cold chain points; district vaccine stores; vaccination session site:
- At all times,the issue of vaccine doses should match the registered list of beneficiaries
- Vials with earlier manufacturing dates should be prioritised
- Supply frequency should be monitored closely
How can the Vaccine wastage be prevented?
The wastage can be prevented in the following ways:
- Sessions should be planned well
- Each vaccine session should service maximum 100 beneficiaries
- The Centre has advised not to open the vials if sites do not have minimum 10 people
- Train vaccinators. Some vaccinator send up drawing only nine doses against 10
WHO tool to calculate vaccine wastage
- The World Health Organization (WHO) recently launched a new vaccine wastage rates calculator tool.
- Based on a model developed by WHO1 , this new tool revises the existing WHO Global Indicative Wastage Rates calculator.
- With this new tool, WHO continues to support immunization programmes by improving annual vaccine forecasting and the monitoring of the utilization of vaccines and wastage rates based on their service delivery settings.
- This new tool’s goal is to estimate, with more precision, vaccine supply requirements and to improve the planning and management of immunization programmes.
- It will estimate automatically the wastage rates for all WHO prequalified vaccines and will increase the accuracy and quality of wastage data at country level.
- The new WHO vaccine wastage calculator computes the total wastage rate, which includes the unavoidable open vial wastage rate, the closed vial wastage rate per storage facility and the avoidable opened vial wastage rate
Source: Indian Express
