IN developing surveillance and prevention programs for communicable diseases, Cuba demonstrated positive results in 2011, taking into account that 26 infectious diseases remain eradicated or have been controlled, as have some of their clinical forms.

Dr. Otto Peláez Sánchez, head of the Ministry of Public Health's Department of Communicable Diseases, listed for Granma the 15 diseases that do not exist in the national environment: poliomyelitis, malaria, neonatal tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, rubella and the congenital rubella syndrome, post-parotitis meningitis, measles, yellow fever, cholera, and severe forms of tuberculosis, human rabies, Leichmaniasis and Chagas disease.

A further eight communicable diseases do not pose a health problem in Cuba due to their low incidence of 0.1 per 10 000 inhabitants. These are: tetanus in adults, meningitis A, haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis B, meningococcal meningitis B and C, parotitis (mumps), typhoid fever, congenital syphilis and AIDS in children. Others registering a very low incidence are leptospirosis, leprosy and brucellosis.

Cuba's success in eradicating a large number of these vaccine-preventable diseases is based on systematic immunization campaigns with an extended coverage. Just last year 6.2 million doses were administered throughout the country. Eleven of the 15 vaccines considered indispensable are administered through the Extended Immunization Program and four of them, to risk groups. These four vaccines prevent seasonal influenza, leptospirosis, yellow fever for persons traveling to countries where the disease is endemic, and anti-rabies to people bitten by animals.

In Cuba, communicable diseases are responsible for approximately 6.9% of the general mortality rate. Of this figure, 6.1% comprise deaths from influenza and pneumonia, the only communicable diseases included among the 10 main causes of death in the population. Only 0.8% of the population die as a result of infectious diseases.

Dr. Pealez noted that worldwide, more than one billion people, one seventh of the global population, die from communicable diseases which are controlled in Cuba.

In order to have an accurate idea of the role played by vaccines which protect Cuban children and the general population from mortal diseases which still exist in the world, suffice it to say that while, in the 1960s, an annual average of 394 persons died in Cuba as a result of poliomyelitis, diphtheria, measles, rubella, mennigococcal tuberculosis, tetanus in newborns, by the period 2005-2009 that figure had fallen to nine persons.

To feel fully satisfied in this context, a solution is required to counter high indices of dengue from the Aedes aegypti mosquito which, given the prevailing situation in the Americas in the case of this vector, constitutes a potential risk for Cuba country, the specialist noted.

Cuba is not isolated from the rest of the world. Its close relations of cooperation and the boom in tourism oblige the country to maintain surveillance and control actions. For that reason, the alert must be constant and it is part of citizens self-responsibility to keep up a systematic fight in favor of hygiene in work places, the environment and at home, in order to fully eradicate Aedes aegypti breeding grounds.