Ministry shouldn’t let up on anti-polio, measles drive

When Public Health and Sanitation Director Shahnaaz Sharif speaks out about a disease outbreak — any disease — people sit up and listen. And when he said a deadly epidemic of measles and polio had been detected in refugee camps in the north of the country, his teams were already on the ground meeting the challenge head-on.

Measles is highly contagious disease and can open up the body to other undesirable complications such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, ear infections, blindness and death if it is not treated immediately. Experts say the disease is so contagious that if a person has it, 90 per cent of the people close to that person who are not immune will also be infected!

Immediately, the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation working with development partners started a nation-wide vaccination campaign against polio and measles to, initially, reach just over 15 million children aged under five years in 86 high-risk districts.

The door-to-door campaign conducted between November 3 and 7 has made significant gains against these two debilitating illnesses and will ensure the children get Vitamin A, the oral polio vaccine and the measles jab.

Ensuring the second measles vaccine is administered regardless of whether any of the children had received it already is to build on gains made by the systematic, worldwide campaign between 2002 and 2008 by Unicef and host governments.

And to make every jab count, administration should be made compulsory under the law, while continuous monitoring and awareness pitches will see sporadic outbreaks in this continent contained. There will no longer be stories like that of the Embu couple who (mis)quote the Gospels to deny their children a normal, healthy life.

It is now left to government agencies, NGOs, public and private development partners, professional societies, and celebrity endorsements to eradicate polio, measles, rickets, kwashiokor, and other childhood diseases.