National anti-polio vaccination begins

Daily Graphic, (spread), Fri. Feb. 13/09

Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho & Cara Fanning
THE United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in collaboration with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), has begun immunising 4.8 million children in the first of two rounds of vaccination against Poliomyelitis (Polio) in the country.
This has become necessary after the discovery of eight cases of the disease in Yendi and other parts of the Northern Region last year.
The first round of immunisation began yesterday and will continue till tomorrow, with the second round being delivered from March 26 to 29, 2009.
The country began polio eradication programmes in 1996 and since then a lot of progress has been made. In a bid to increase coverage, Ghana has since 2000 changed its strategy of immunising children at fixed locations to using mobile vaccination teams who visit target groups from house to house.
As part of the immunisation exercise, the Country Representative of UNICEF, Dr Yasmine Haque, joined a team of nurses from the Mamprobi Polyclinic and visited Glefe, a suburb of Mamprobi in the Ablekuma South Sub-metro, where 3,500 children under the age of five are expected to be immunised within the next three days.
According to Dr Haque, Ghana had for some years now made significant progress in the eradication of the virus, saying that the re-emergence of the virus could be attributed to migration within the sub-region.
To ensure that the whole region was free from the virus, she said the exercise was being replicated in seven other West African countries, including Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria.
“Till we get polio eradicated from the world, no one is free,” she indicated.
Dr Haque also said the exercise included Vitamin A supplementation to boost children’s immunity against other illnesses they could be susceptible to.
According to her, an emergency vaccination exercise was done three weeks after the eight cases of polio were discovered and added that the current exercise was to consolidate previous actions.
The UNICEF country representative later visited Chorkor, a community near Glefe, where she interacted with the volunteers and some mothers.
A Principal Nursing Officer of the Mamprobi Polyclinic, Ms Harriet Allotey, said in order to reach each and every child, Glefe had been divided into 10 zones, with groups of volunteers covering each zone.
She recounted how, some years ago, parents refused to allow the volunteers to vaccinate their children because of a misconception that the vaccine contained some harmful substances, saying that so far they had not encountered any problem with parents in the area, as residents of homes and managers of educational centres visited were willing to allow their children to be vaccinated
This year’s immunisation exercise was launched last week, during which the Programme Manager of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation, Dr K. Antwi Agyei, assured parents and guardians that “receiving repeated doses of the vaccine is not harmful in any way to children but a definite way to ensure interruption of circulation of the disease”.