Southern African nation – Malawi has begun the first round of a mass oral polio vaccine campaign for children under the age of five after the nation recorded its first case of wild poliovirus (type 1) in 30 years last month.
The recorded case of wild poliovirus type 1 paralysed a 3-year old child in the capital Lilongwe in February.
Polio is a crippling and potentially fatal infectious disease with no cure, but there are safe and effective vaccines, which given multiple times can protect a child for life. Eradicating polio requires immunizing every child until transmission stops and the world is free of all forms of poliovirus.
African governments have strived to eradicate the virus for decades and in August 2020, the continent was certified free of indigenous wild polio.
A United Nations report says Nigeria is the first country in the world to use nOPV2 to tackle an outbreak in March 2021, vaccinating 7 million children in six states. By September, Benin, Congo, Liberia, Niger and Sierra Leone had also rolled out the vaccine. Africa was certified free of wild polio in August 2020, but outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived polio type 2 are still being reported.
Responding to the call, women brought their children for immunization as the Malawian health minister took the lead in administering the shots.
One of the mothers who brought their children for vaccination at the Gateway Clinic in Blantyre, Malawi’s second-biggest city, Gloria Kasula, remarked “I always want to put the well being of my child first at all times, that’s why I had to put everything aside and come here to have my child fully protected because right now we are at a very scary moment.”
WHO representative in Malawi, Dr Janet Kayita said “There has been a huge massive effort to strengthen the routine immunization system’’
Dr Kayita pointed out the benefits of routine immunization saying, “We mustn’t forget the routine immunization system. This is the core pillar of the response and is really important because it is through this immunization programme the children get oral polio vaccine but also IPV and together these protect children against polio.”
More than nine million children, under the age of five, are to be vaccinated against polio in the first round of a vaccination campaign against wild polio virus type 1 using the bivalent Oral Polio Vaccine recommended by World Health Organization (WHO).