20/04/2020 - Health

KEY POINTS

·         A social vaccine is a metaphor for a series of social and behavioural measures that governments can use to raise public consciousness about unhealthy situations through social mobilisation.

·         Social mobilisation can empower populations to resist unhealthy practices, increase resilience, and foster advocacy for change. This can drive political will to take action in the interests of society and hold governments accountable to address the social determinants of health by adopting progressive socio-economic policies and regulatory mechanisms that promote health equity and reduce vulnerability to disease.

·         When applied to pandemics, the effectiveness of a social vaccine is determined by the extent of dissemination and uptake of accurate information about personal infection risk and methods to reduce the risk through consistent core messages disseminated through a variety of means.

·         A social vaccine addresses barriers and facilitators of behaviour change, whether attitudinal, social, cultural, or economic, and supplements information, education, and communication (IEC) with targeted social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) strategies.

·         Reducing HIV transmission centred on acknowledging that everybody was potentially infected — even those apparently healthy — and that infection occurred predominantly through sexual transmission and intravenous drug use.

·         The core infection-control messages are available from official sources. Maintaining physical distancing in social situations (unless impossible) and wearing cloth masks or facial coverings in public (especially where distancing is impossible) by 100% of people (and 100% of the time) is key to preventing infection along with regular disinfection of oneself and one’s surroundings.

·         Effective and innovative IEC and SBCC strategies should address the barriers and facilitators to implementation.

·         A social vaccine also requires people to hold leaders accountable to invest in: rapidly scaling-up testing; meeting the basic and economic needs of vulnerable sections; providing psychological support where needed.

Around 2.5 million are affected with Covid-19 so far and more than 1.5 lakh fatalities occurred across the globe.Countries started clinical trials to find an effective medicinal vaccine.Though there is no biological cure so far,world has used a very known vaccine to contain the pandemic which helped even in the past for containing the pandemics like HIV/AIDS,SARS.Its nothing but the SOCIAL VACCINE.

SOCIAL VACCINE AND SOCIETAL IMMUNITY :

Social vaccine can be defined as spreading socio-behavioural measures which are required to bring awareness among the societies regarding the pandemic.

In the present situation,socio - behavioural measures include wearing face masks,maintaining proper hygiene,social distancing etc.

The success of the vaccine which helps to develop immunity in the society depends on the society itself.Proper advertising,educating the fellow beings with true information,spreading the need of the measures really helps in achieving herd immunity which can also be called as societal immunity.

People often guided by their leaders.Social vaccine will be successful if and only if leaders bring awareness among their societies.Even,people has to question about the measures taken by their leaders there by making them responsible for their actions which make leaders to act properly.

For every problem there will be a solution,hence world should not loss hope.Social vaccine contains the spread of virus and its in the hands of people and people representatives to make it successful,ultimately saving their own lives and also for building immunity to the effects of future pandemics.