Physicians and other medical professionals yesterday launched an advocacy group dedicated to immunization issues.
The Taiwan Immunization Vision and Strategy is modeled on the Global Immunization Vision and Strategy (GIVS), one of the WHO's organization.
The primary goal of the GIVS is to promote vaccination and to advise nations on how best to manage the vaccination process. Through immunization, GIVS hopes by 2015 to prevent more than 70 million children in the world's poorest countries from contracting fatal diseases each year.
Tu Sing-jhe (涂醒哲), former minister of the Department of Health, said that the government should allow vaccinations against diseases or viruses such as pertussis, pneumococcus, hemophilus influenza type B, rotavirus and cervical cancer to be covered by the national health insurance.
"Theoretically speaking, the more thorough the immunization effort, the less the national health insurance bureau has to expend to cure diseases," he said.
Tu said that the nation had not made any significant progress on immunization since 1984.
Lee Ping-ing (李秉穎), a pediatrician at the National Taiwan University Hospital, said the government needed to increase its funding of immunization: "The reason immunization in Taiwan cannot keep up with world standards is because the entire operation has been underfunded."
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