Bavaria: Vaccination rate has remained stable – Bavaria

The corona pandemic has not led to a decline in child vaccinations. This emerges from the new health report of the State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL), said the Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holetschek (CSU) on Wednesday. In some cases, vaccination rates have even increased. This is the case with the vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccination) and the vaccination against chickenpox. The rate of infants born in 2019 who had a second MMR vaccination after 24 months was 79.3 percent.

Compared to previous years, vaccination rates for polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) and pneumococci have fallen slightly. Professor Christian Weidner, President of the LGL, said that vaccination education must be consistently continued, because there are diseases in which vaccination protection can be further increased.

The current health report has shown that there is still a lot of catching up to do when it comes to vaccination against human papilloma viruses (HPV). According to the information, there has been an increase in boys since the introduction of the vaccination recommendation for this group in 2018 to 2021. In 2020, however, only 47.6 percent of 18-year-old girls in Bavaria were vaccinated. The World Health Organization (WHO) wants to achieve a global vaccination rate of 90 percent for 15-year-old girls by 2030. The minister explained that an HPV infection can cause cervical cancer, among other things, but also cancer in men. Vaccination in childhood and adolescence protects against the development of cancer.

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