Vaccination programmes now represent a major part of the effort devoted to improving the health of children in developing countries. These donor-funded programmes tend to be global in scope and focus on worldwide goals and targets such as 'polio eradication', and the Millennium Development Goals. Health policy makers at the national level are expected to implement these programmes in a standard manner and report progress according to a few standard indicators. Pressures and incentives to meet the targets set are then transmitted down to the community level health worker who actually meets the parents and children to implement the programmes.

Drawing on first hand, original research in India and Malawi carried out by the contributors, as well as existing literature, Protecting the World's Children: Immunisation policies and practices discusses that there is little or no scope allowed for the effects of variance in the way health systems work, the difficulties and tensions faced by health workers, or differences in the way people think about childhood illnesses that reflect cultural differences within global immunisation policy.

The book argues that the need to show progress can create distortions and lead to the production of misleading data and an unwillingness to report problems. It proposes that vaccines could more effectively serve children's health needs if immunisation programmes are better understood and acknowledged, and if local knowledge and realities were enabled to inform national and international health policy.

Written by global experts in immunisation policy, Protecting the World's Children is an integrative study of immunisation policy and practice at a global, national and community level, and is an essential resource for researchers and practitioners in international and public health, as well as professionals in international and development studies.

About the Author:
Sidsel Roalkvam, Associate Professor Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway, Desmond McNeill, Professor, Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway, Stuart Blume, Emeritus Professor, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Sidsel Roalkvam is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. She is Academic Director of 'Livelihoods in Developing Countries', an interdisciplinary research programme at the University of Oslo. Her research interests span from global health to kinship, community, personhood, religion, morality and ethics. Roalkvam has done extensive fieldwork in Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Her most recent publications are 'Vaccines and the Global System / or Why Study Vaccines?', and 'Choosing Vaccination: Negotiating Child Protection and Good Citizenship in Modern India', both published in Forum for Development Studies 37 (3) in 2010.

Desmond McNeill (M.A in economics from Cambridge; Ph.D in economics from University College London) is Professor, and former Director, at SUM, the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Oslo. He heads the research area on Governance for Sustainable Development, and is Director of SUMs Research School.He has worked in over 15 developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and written extensively on aid and global governance. His books include: The Contradictions of Foreign Aid, Croom Helm 1981; Multilateral Institutions: A Critical Introduction (with M. Boas). Pluto Press 2003; Global Institutions and Development: Framing the World? (ed. with M. Boas), Routledge, 2004; Development Issues in Global Governance: Public-Private Partnerships and Market Multilateralism (with B. Bull), Routledge, 2007; Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: the role of multilateral organisations, Routledge, 2009.

Stuart Blume was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Merton College Oxford. He subsequently worked at the University of Sussex, the OECD (Paris), the London School of Economics, and in various administrative positions including from 1975-1977 in the Social Research Coordinating Unit, The Cabinet Office, London, and from 1977-1980 as Secretary, Committee on Social Inequalities in Health, Department of Health, London (The 'Black Committee'). In 1982 he moved to the Netherlands as Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he became Emeritus Professor in 2007. In 2013-2014 Stuart Blume will be working at the University of Cuenca, Ecuador.