Hidden Menace in the Universal Child Immunization Program

Abstract

Short-term, technocentric approaches to health care–“selective primary health care”–in Third World countries, as advocated by UNICEF and other international agencies, threaten to reverse the historic gains made at the Alma-Ata Conference in 1978. The primary health care strategy presented in the Alma-Ata Declaration was the culmination of the struggle for democratization of health services in the Third World. In this article, the author discusses the effects of the selective primary health care approach, as exemplified by the Universal Child Immunization Program, on general health services and its fundamental contradictions with the primary health care approach, and presents the manifesto drawn up at the Meeting on Selective Primary Health Care held in Antwerp in 1985.