Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 26, 1994 TAG: 9411280032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HELSINKI, FINLAND LENGTH: Medium
The program, initiated as part of a United Nations effort to eradicate the diseases by 2000, is likely to become a model for other programs to prevent the illnesses, which affected tens of thousands of Finnish children in the 1970s.
``We consider we've been successful in eradicating these diseases,'' researcher Olli Heinonen, of the University of Helsinki, said Friday. ``I believe we're the first country to have done so.''
In a separate report, doctors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta told of dramatic progress toward eliminating polio in China.
The results of the Finnish vaccination program were published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 1982, the government-run health service began vaccinating all babies aged 14 months to 18 months. A second injection was given at 6, one year before children in Finland normally begin school.
In all, more than 1.5 million people in a population of 5 million were vaccinated, Heinonen said. The injections were part of a free postnatal health care provided by the state.
Now there are less than 10 cases of each disease a year, most of them probably imported, he said.
``Our success was largely due to the secondary injection,'' Heinonen said. ``Most other countries only give one injection, but our studies showed that, by the age of 6, the antibodies were not as high as they should have been.''
In the two decades before the program began, measles killed an average 10 children a year and caused permanent deafness and mental retardation in hundreds of others. Mumps annually made some 750 men sterile, and rubella damaged about 50 fetuses each year, Heinonen said.
by CNB