About 5.3 million children under 5yrs would be immunized against measles -Rubella in an upcoming mass vaccination campaign scheduled for October 2- 6th following an outbreak of the disease across the country.
These children aged 9months to 5yrs include some 600 thousand of them who had been missed since the last mop up exercise since 2018 and those due for their first and 2nd doses of the vaccine.
Measles is a highly contagious disease that spreads through fluids from an infected person and vaccination is the most effective way to prevent its spread. In Ghana, babies are immunized against measles when they are nine months old and eligible for another dose when they reach 18 months.
Although coverage of the measles rubella vaccination is quiet high in the country, the inability of government to get 100% coverage, resulted in some children under five being missed out during routine immunization each year.
Aside these cohorts of children who have been missed, a chunk number of children who received their first doses at 9months have defaulted in receiving their second doses which provides the maximum protection of the child against the killer disease.
Healthcare workers are not oblivious of the dangers. Rebecca K. Avornyo, a Health Educator at the LEKMA Polyclinic said even when the mothers are called and reminded of their dates for routine immunization, they still don’t turn up and would be rushing over to the facility when they see rashes on their babies.
‘‘Measles is among the childhood killer diseases and the good thing is that it can be prevented with vaccination so why don’t you make the babies available? The men should please get involved. Help the mothers to remember their routine dates. It’s almost the same last week. Yes, that was Friday. We have a mother around who was just scared because she saw some rashes. So she has a little knowledge. I’m sure she was thinking, it could be measles. So she came to us. So when we assess we notice that, no, it’s not measles. But this same mother has been given a date to come for child welfare clinic a month before she didn’t come, and when she saw the son before she rushed here. So what we are having that it’s an issue that most mothers are not helping us to close the gap,” she said.
She further added that “the problem is that mothers think that immediately we finish a nine-month immunization, then we are complete with everything, but we are fully Ignite. No, your child is not fully immunized. Your child needs to continue, come to check the weight, monitoring the weight, because things may even change in the child’s growth.”
Already cases of measles are being reported in all districts across the country, raising concerns but mothers who play a critical role in making their babies available for the vaccines are failing in that regard.
Mary Vigah a mother of a 9months old child whom we met at the LEKMA polyclinic says she would not miss her son’’s vaccination days for anything.
‘‘I always make sure that I check his folder a week to the day which helps me remember. On Tuesday he will be 9months and he will need to take his first dose of measles vaccine. I will not miss it. I know the benefits so I will bring him” she excitedly exclaimed.
The program manager of the expanded program on immunization at the Ghana Health Service, Dr Kwame Amponsa- Achianno in an interview with 3news’ Sarah Apenkroh said they had predicted the situation of outbreaks hence the upcoming campaign to bridge the gaps.
‘‘For vaccination coverage, no matter how hard we try, it is not likely that we’ll capture every child, even though the coverage is high. So over time, over the past several years, coverage has been improving and has been quite high, 90%, 95% so the conversation was about the other parts were unreached. The last time was 2018 so it means we have about six years of the left-hand cohort. We predicted that there were some bottlenecks, but now we’ve circumvented them,”he assured.
He also noted that the regions have already been trained for the exercise.
“Yes, we’ve had several districts with several cases. In fact, the strict definition of an outbreak is not what we as it were, from the outside world. See it when we have two confirmed cases of measles within one month in a particular district, we call it outbreak. So, some of the outbreaks will come, they burn out, others will come, and so on. But the bottom line is that we have several districts that have reported cases, whether confirmed or unconfirmed, and as I said earlier, this is not something we didn’t predict. We could see that, and we were planning for this campaign and we’ve even trained regions already,” he noted.
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