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This The Journal of Infectious Diseases supplement rightly focuses on the notion of integrated healthcare, which has a long history in public health. Integrated healthcare has been proposed to tackle the need for complementarity of different interdependent services and structures to better achieve common goals [1]. Integration offers the opportunity to focus on the resolution of broader health system barriers, such as absence of qualified human resources or poor infrastructure that hamper immunization as well as other health interventions. By alleviating these barriers and providing multiple preventive and curative interventions, there is a high expectation of a corresponding increase in the demand and use of health services by the target population.

In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF launched the Global Immunization Vision and Strategy (GIVS) in response to estimates that more than 10 million children were dying each year [2, 3]. GIVS calls for deliberate planning efforts to extend immunization coverage, especially for underserved, hard-to-reach people. GIVS has served to guide countries in expanding the scope of national immunization programss to reduce vaccine-preventable disease mortality and morbidity by two thirds by 2015 compared with 2000, as a contribution towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, especially Goal 4: reducing under-5 mortality. Although the estimated number of deaths had fallen to 8.1 million by 2009, the levels of mortality in children less than 5 years old in the WHO African Region (127 per 1000 live births) and in low-income countries (117 per 1000 live births) were still higher than the 1990 global level of 89 per 1000 live births [4].

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