Polio immunisation turnout low
2006-07-03 09:36
Badume - Habibu Garba and his five colleagues are not happy. Posted for three days to a vaccination centre, under a neem tree sheltering them from blazing tropical sun, they had only vaccinated 32 children against poliovirus.
The small farming village of Badume, 15km north of Kano, had recorded a very low turnout of children, like the rest of the area.
Garba said: "We have not immunised as much children as we expected because people here only take their children to hospital when they are sick, they don't mind to take them for any vaccination.
"We need to meet them in their homes, which we are about to start today. It is not that they reject the vaccines, it is just that they don't have the culture of bringing their children for immunisation."
Immunisation Plus
A 47-year old farmer Baballe Adamu said: "I will allow them to immunise my three children if they come to my home as they did some months ago."
The National Programme on Immunisation (NPI) in collaboration with the United Nations health agencies on Thursday started a five-day immunisation campaign tagged "Immunisation Plus" of about 10 million children under five in 11 northern states with high prevalence of polio cases.
The NPI, with technical assistance from WHO and Unicef, hoped to stamp out polio from Nigeria by the end of 2007.
The five-day campaign was also immunising children under the age of five against measles, diphtheria, pertusis and tetanus, tagged "The Plus" in addition to the administration of polio vaccine.
NPI Kano state Zonal co-ordinator Mahmud Mustapha said: "We are recording low turn-out at the vaccination sites."
Health workers administer polio vaccines
He said that the low turnout compared to the first round of vaccinations in May was partly because the state and local government authorities didn't supply the expected doses plus parents were worried about the pains and fever associated with "The Plus".
Mustapha said: "In fact, the pains and fever a child suffers after the vaccination are an indication that he is developing an immune response, which parents are not aware of due to the low level of health education."
For two days, health workers administered polio vaccines at fixed posts in thousands of wards across the 11 mainly Muslim states.
However, on Saturday the health workers started a house-to-house immunisation to ensure that they reached the 10 million children the NPI intended to immunise.
According to a UN World Health Organisation report, Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, had the most polio cases in the world, accounting for 83% of global poliovirus cases and 95% of all polio cases in Africa.
Some northern states halted the polio immunisation drive for 11 months in 2004 and 2005 after radical Muslim clerics claimed the vaccine was laced with substances that could render girls infertile as part of the United States-led western plot to depopulate Africa.