NIGERIA-HEALTH: Immunisation Start

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

IWAYA, Dec 11 1996 (IPS) - Nigeria’s campaign to immunise children and halt the resurgence of preventable diseases got off to a good start this week with parents flocking to health centres nationwide.

Some 60 women, with babies on their laps, arrived at the health centre here, just outside Lagos, in the early hours of the morning and sat on long benches waiting for the health officials to arrive.

Like parents throughout the country, they had paid close attention to the nationwide radio and television broadcast on Monday evening in which Maryam Abacha, the wife of Nigeria’s military ruler, urged parents to have their children immunised.

Abacha’s address marked the beginnational Programme on Immunisation (NPI) which ends on Wednesday. The next two-day campaign starts on Jan 16.

Twenty-two-year-old Monica Chukwu told IPS that she had heard Abacha and had brought her child to the clinic. But whawas the fact that she has seen children paralysed by preventable diseases like polio.

“I don’t want my children to be deformed, so I have seized this opportunity to immunise my child,” said Chukwu, who has an eight-month-old daughter.

According to reports from around the country, parents have turned out in large numbers.

Health officials have been battling against many obstacles to immunise the children during the two-day campaign.

“We already have the vaccines in our stores, but there are no vehicles to convey staff and the vaccines to the centres. We were told that all the local government vehicles have broken down,” said a Mainland local government official who declined to be named.

“Our department asked for 500,000 naira (about 6,250 dollars) to enable us to carry out a successful exercise, but the chairman only approved 100,000 naira (about 1,250 dollars) which is not enough to hire vehicles and pay stipends to those going to carry out the immunisation,” the government official added.

The Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the Family Support Programme, which was initiated by Nigeria’s first lady, have declared Dec 10 and 11 and Jan 16 and 17 each year as National Immunisation Days (NID).

“In order to increase coverage and attain the main objective, the government has decided to implement the NIDS in two rounds each year, with a six-week period in between the rounds,” Abacha said.

In a statement made available to IPS, the NPI manager in the Ministry of Health, Mike Anibueke, explained that the NID was a concept introduced by the ministry as a mass strategy to boost and sustain immunisation coverage nationwide.

The programme is supported by the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organisation, Rotary International and other non-governmental groups.

At the end of 1989, Nigeria recorded a 60 percent immunisation coverage and was pushing toward achieving the Universal Child Immunisation (UCI) target of 80 percent in 1990, Anibueze said.

But when immunisation coverage began to decline after 1990, the government was compelled to revisit the strategies, he said. This led to the new NPI which was launched by Maryam Abacha in July.

Health officials blamed the decline on the political and economic crises in Nigeria, and poor logistics which led to a breakdown of the mobile immunisation campaigns.

Statistics in the 1996 UNICEF State of The World Children Report show that between 1990 and 1994, Nigeria h1994, Nigeria had achieved 46 percent immunisation coverage for tuberculosis, 41 percent for DPT, 35 percent for polio and 41 percent for measles.

UNICEF’s goa target of 90 percent immunisation among children under one year,ation of neonatal tetanus, and a 90 percent reduction in deaths through measles.

Despite the setbacks, the health sector has recorded some progress, especially in its fight against polio.

According to Ministry of Health figures, Nigeria reported a total of 8,417 polio cases between 1982 and 1992. In 1993, onlthe health statistics show.

In the last five years, the government has spent about five million dollars on the polio eradication programme alone. For the NID, government has procured 210 million doses of various vaccines for the prevention of tuberculosis, whooping cough, polio, menigitis and hepatitis.