Dear viewers

We wish to share the original article -- “Study on Hepatitis B Birth dose Vaccination Coverage, Promoting the same in a Private Rural Medical College”.

Though Viral Hepatitis – a silent public health problem of “extraordinary scale” could not feature in MDG goals, got qualified to be observed as “World Hepatitis Day” since July 2010. On record analysis of vaccination data entered in the extended Immunogram of RHTC Sampaje with only ~17,500 population, 216 children below one year, inspired us to take up the study in a little larger scale covering 4 planning units with 1,19,837 population, cohort of 1508 children born between 01^st April 2013 and 31^st March 2014. Of this, 1075 (71.28%) were born in 96 private facilities who administered birth dose to 466 (43.3.5%) children and 433 (28.71%) were born in 41 Government facilities and HepB birth dose was administered to 380 (87.76%) live births. HepB birth dose was introduced in 2009 in Karnataka.

After finding the gap, we made an effort to promote the same through simple doable measures in a rural Medical College; the coverage dramatically improved from 19% in April to 100% in July and high coverage is sustained till date. It was stated that “Raising birth dose coverage” is one of the major concerns.  Position paper on HepB vaccine also expressed that birth dose coverage is to be included as one of the performance indicators to review the performance in the regular review meeting for sustaining the achievement.

Hence we thought of sharing the attached article with the viewers for further inputs.    

best regards

Holla and the team