London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

In the ECOHOST Seminar Series

On 1 September 2015, two children in western Ukraine were reported to have been paralysed by polio. For a number of years international agencies had been increasingly concerned about falling vaccination coverage across the country. A perfect storm of poor access to vaccination services, irrational procurement procedures and growing anti-vaccination sentiment driven by media panics meant that vaccination coverage fell to 57% by 2010. This was even before conflict in the east of the country displaced more than 2.3 million Ukrainians. The third round of an emergency vaccination programme is now under way, but it still faces considerable barriers in implementation. In this seminar Erica will be explaining how these factors came together in Ukraine to make the case for further research.

Erica Richardson is an Honorary Research Fellow at ECOHOST – the centre for health and social change. Erica’s research interests focus on the development of health systems, health policy and health education in the countries of the former Soviet Union.