Ghana to Fight Polio (Mirror)

Saturday, February 14, 2009

AS a result of the successful implementation of the national polio vaccination days (NIDs), Ghana was removed from the list of polio endemic countries in 2003.
Consequently, the announcement some few days ago that eight wild poliomyelitis (polio) cases had been confirmed in the Northern Region from August to November last year is worrying to many Ghanaians. Polio is described as an acute viral disease that is easily spread from human contact and can kill or cripple children for life.
But, according to official reports from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, these cases likely stemmed from northern Nigeria — a high-risk region for polio.
To prevent the situation from becoming a major national health issue, the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has put in place a programme to vaccinate 4.8 million children against the disease through two rounds of a nation-wide polio immunisation campaign scheduled from February 12 to 14, 2009 for the first round and March 26 to 28, 2009 for the second round.
Vitamin A supplementation will be added during the first round of the exercise and about 4.3 million children aged six months to five years will benefit.
The campaign, which was launched in Accra, is part of a joint programme organised by eight West African countries to eradicate polio from the sub-region.
The countries are Benin, Togo, Niger, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana.
Speaking at the launch, the Programme Manager for the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), Dr K. Antwi-Agyei, said a lot of progress had been made since the country began polio eradication programmes in 1996.
The programme manager gave the assurance that the disease could be controlled if the right things were done and said receiving repeated doses of the vaccine was not harmful in any way to children but a definite way to ensure the interruption of circulation of the disease.
For his part, the Director-General of the GHS, Dr Elias Sory, described the exercise as very important, as the aim of the health sector was to interrupt the circulation of the polio virus through the combined effort of synchronising the campaign across eight countries.
He took the opportunity to advise parents to ensure that their children below five years were immunised.
In an attempt to increase coverage of immunisation, Ghana, from the year 2000, changed its strategy of immunising children at fixed locations to using mobile vaccination teams who visited the target groups from house to house.
Information available at the EPI under the GHS indicated that nearly four million children received two supplemental doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) each year.