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YEMEN: Anti-polio drive targets over four million children
Source: IRIN
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SANAA, 19 November 2008 (IRIN) - Health teams are carrying out a
national anti-polio campaign with the aim of being able to declare Yemen polio free by 2009, the Ministry of Health and Population has said. The three-day campaign, which began on 17 November, is
targeting 4,180,000 under-fives in all 21 governorates. Doses of Vitamin A are also being administered during the campaign to raise the level of the children's immunity to other diseases. Some
18,000 mobile teams nationwide are carrying out the door-to-door campaign. Another 2,000 teams are giving children polio vaccines in health centres. Ghada al-Habout, deputy head of the Ministry of
Health's National Vaccination Centre, said the campaign aims to prevent polio in Yemen, after six confirmed polio cases were found in Sudan last month. In 2005, 479 polio cases were confirmed
during a serious polio outbreak. Following the outbreak, the Health Ministry adopted a door-to-door vaccination strategy. Since February 2006 no polio cases have been reported, she said.
"Surveillance has become strong throughout Yemen and specialists can discover polio cases easily." The current campaign was jointly funded by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Health
Organization (WHO) and the Ministry of Health and Population. Obstacles Al-Habout said the mobile teams had encountered various obstacles. "Sometimes, families would ask a mobile team to
come back in an hour or during the evening to vaccinate their children… The team gets disappointed when people reject vaccination," she said. Some families refused to have their children
vaccinated, saying "the vaccines come from outside Yemen and are manufactured solely to cause diseases in the Arab world." Others were fearful of "strange substances" entering the bodies of their
children, saying such things were against their religion. Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours,
according to WHO [see http://www.polioeradication.org/disease.asp]. In December 2007, a national anti-polio campaign targeted over four million children [see:
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=75886]. Al-Habout said the 2007 campaign was "over 90 percent successful". maj/ar/cb© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and
analysis: http://www.IRINnews.org
