Newer vaccines in the Universal Immunisation Programme

Vaccines are important preventive medicines for primary healthcare and critical for a nation's health security. In India the Universal Programme of Immunization (UPI), launched in 7985, included six childhood vaccines. A well thought out immunisation schedule must be epidemiologically relevant to the country's health status, covering only diseases that are public health problems and for which effective vaccines are available. There has been pressure from the drug industry to include all newly developed vaccines in the government's UIP even though the clinical and epidemiological justification for their inclusion is debated. Many developed countries have included several other new vaccines in their regular immunisation programmes. These trends are used as a justification by the industry to include these vaccines in the Indian UIP in the future. All these vaccines need not, and cannot, be given universally. This paper looks at some vaccines which are newly included in the UIP schedule, or which may be included in the near future.