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US vaccination campaign preventing thousands of deaths

A US government programme launched 20 years ago to increase vaccinations for low-income children in the US will prevent more than 700,000 deaths, but the [b]Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)[/b] said measles remains a stubborn adversary. According to a [s]Reuters Health[/s] report, the CDC said most of the US measles cases are linked to unvaccinated travellers from abroad, which, they says, makes vaccination even more important for children in the US. ‘Borders can’t stop diseases anymore, but vaccinations can,’ CDC Director Tom Frieden said. The programme will prevent more than 21m hospitalisations and 732,000 deaths among children born in the last 20 years based on estimates of how many illnesses there would have been without the extra immunisations, the CDC said.

[link url=http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/24/us-usa-health-vaccines-idUSBREA3N27V20140424]Full Reuters Health report[/link]

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