TEHRAN –The health ministry will start distributing domestically made pentavalent vaccines across the country on Tuesday, the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said.

Pentavalent vaccine is a combination vaccine with five individual vaccines conjugated into one. It protects infants against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B, and Haemophilus influenzae type B.

“The distribution of the first shipment of the locally-made five-in-one combination vaccine will officially commence tomorrow, on Tuesday, all over the country,” IRNA quoted Mehdi Pir-salehi as saying.

“So far, about 800,000 units of the vaccine have been developed, and this number is expected to reach 1.2 million units in the next 2 to 3 days,” he noted.

The official went on to say that “The main objective is to provide and improve timely access to vaccines to fully cover the country’s immunization program; the Food and Drug Administration will manage and monitor the supply and distribution process around the clock.”

The pentavalent vaccine was integrated into the national vaccination programme in November 2014. According to the national vaccination program, each child must receive the pentavalent vaccine 3 times at intervals of 2 months. The first is usually at the end of the second month of life. 

Recent vaccination program

In line with the polio eradication campaign that kicked off in winter, around 300,000 more children under five years of age are getting vaccinated in two phases in high-risk areas in the country’s northern half in spring, according to the health ministry.

Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that largely affects children under 5 years of age. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the fecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (for example, contaminated water or food) and multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis.

It can be prevented through immunization. The development of effective vaccines to prevent paralytic polio was one of the major medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. The Polio vaccine, given multiple times, almost always protects a child for life. 

In the current Iranian year that started on March 20, the first phase was conducted from April 12 to 14, and the second phase is planned to be implemented from June 17 to 19, the health ministry reported.

Polio eradication camping is among the remarkable achievements of the health ministry. The supplementary immunization campaign to eradicate polio in Iran started in 1994. Thanks to the campaign, the country has been polio-free since 2000.

However, in Iran’s two neighboring countries, namely Afghanistan and Pakistan, endemic transmission of wild poliovirus is still prevalent. In 2024, the number of wild poliovirus positives in Afghanistan and Pakistan increased by four and twelve times, respectively, compared to 2023.

To prevent the outbreak of the disease in the country, in the past Iranian calendar year which ended on March 20, the annual door-to-door polio vaccination campaign was implemented in two phases, with a month interval between them, targeting children under the age of five in high-risk regions in the southern part of the country.

The first phase was conducted from January 4 to 6, and the second phase started on February 15 and concluded on February 17. During the campaign, some 840,000 Iranian and foreign national children under the age of 5 were immunized against polio by medical universities in Sistan-Baluchestan, Kerman, Fars, Hormozgan, Bushehr, Khuzestan, South Khorasan, and Yazd provinces.

MT/MG