Ministry of Health expands dengue vaccination to 625 more cities | Health

The Ministry of Health announced this Thursday (25) that 625 more municipalities will receive the dengue vaccine.

The 625 cities are located in 6 states: Alagoas, Ceará, Sergipe, Rio Grande do Sul, Piauí and Mato Grosso.

According to the ministry, distribution of doses will begin next Friday (26). A technical note with distribution details should still be published this Thursday.

Check the list of 47 Health Regionswhich are located in these six states, which will receive the new shipment of vaccines:

As a result, the dengue vaccine will now be applied in 25 federation unitswith a total of 1330 municipalities. And this time, around 986 thousand doses of the vaccine will be distributed.

“Although we are on a downward and stabilizing trend [da dengue ] in several states, we need to make it clear that many people will still get sick, but we can avoid many deaths”, said the Secretary of Health and Environment Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, Ethel Maciel, at a press conference in Brasília.

Last week, the Technical Chamber of Immunizations of the Ministry of Health decided to allow the expansion of age groups for the dengue vaccine in the Unified Health System (SUS) in the case of vaccines that are about to expire.

Vaccines valid until April 30 can be administered to people aged 4 to 59, at the discretion of the municipalities that have leftover doses.

The ministry reinforces that priority should be given to the age group between 10 and 14 years old, a group for which doses have already been released since the beginning of March. Despite this, low adherence meant that doses stored in municipalities approached their expiration date.

The second dose will be guaranteed for the public who takes the vaccine in advance.

The ministry also reported that it is not possible to quantify the doses available with this expiration date, as they have already been distributed and the applications are not immediately reported to the Ministry of Health. The data may take days or weeks to be passed on to the federal system .

According to the Ministry of Health, 1,682,139 doses have already been distributed to the states and DF since the start of vaccination. Of this quantity, 810,686 were applied and 700,488 were not registered (that is, they may not have been applied yet or, due to the municipality’s slowness, they may not have entered the system).

Brazil was the first country in the world to offer the vaccine on the public network. Children and adolescents aged 10 to 14 are eligible to receive the vaccine through SUS.

The country has already registered more than 3.8 million cases of dengue in 2024, the highest number recorded in the entire historical series, which has been carried out since 2000. The previous record for the disease had been broken in 2015, when 1,688,688 were recorded. cases.

According to the Arbovirus Panel, updated this Thursday (25), the country has 3,852,901 cases (probable and confirmed) dengue fever and 1,792 confirmed deaths from the disease up to week 16.

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