Millions of children to benefit from vaccination

Millions of children around the world are set to benefit from a plan to provide funding for vaccination programmes in developing countries.

The funding initiative will provide an initial £2 billion over a ten-year period to fund health programmes to cut deaths from many common childhood illnesses such as polio, measles, and diphtheria.

Chancellor Gordon Brown along with European finance ministers will launch a complex finance scheme that will in effect provide a loan to developing countries that will allow them to fund more extensive communicable disease programmes for children.

The funding provided under the auspices of an International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) will be offset against future health funding repayments and has already been criticised as a "buy now, pay later" package for poorer countries.

The UK has pledged £70 million to the finance scheme and other European countries are to unveil their contributions to the scheme today at a meeting of ministers in Manchester.

The Gates Foundation, set up by the billionaire boss of Microsoft, Bill Gates, and his wife Melinda, has pledged US$750 million (£408m) towards the programme over ten years.

The governments of the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden have pledged commitments to fund IFFIm, which will support childhood vaccine programmes through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).

In a statement today, Bill Gates said the commitments announced would provide a "major boost to GAVI’s work to ensure that all children - no matter where they are born - have access to lifesaving vaccines".

He commended the governments for their generosity, and Gordon Brown in particular for his "tireless work to make this announcement possible".

He said that it was "unacceptable" that each year 27 million children go without immunizations that are "taken for granted" in rich countries.

Mr Gates said that he hoped other donor governments would come on board to support IFFIm.

Commending the scheme, Mr Brown said that the 10 million lives could be saved and that millions of families could be "spared the agony of a loved one needlessly dying".

However, the finance scheme is not without its critics. Concern has been voiced over the huge borrowing that some countries would have to make and subsequent repayments that would have to be made.

The US administration is not in favour of the IFFIm scheme.

(SP/MB)