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Six States to Benefit From Special Immunisation Programme

Daily Trust (Abuja)

June 10, 2003
Posted to the web June 10, 2003

Ikenna Emeka Okpani
 

Six states, one each from the six geo-political zones across the country, are to benefit from a new component of the programme called partnership to Reinforce Immunisation Efficiency (PRIME) funded by the European Commission (EC).

The states, Daily Trust gathered are Abia, Cross River, Gombe, Kebbi, Osun and Plateau. The objective of the programme which is funded to the tune of N6.6 billion is to help to reduce the burden of vaccine preventable diseases by developing the capacity to manage an immunisation programme at all levels.

According to the EU, "The programme will provide necessary funding for managing and delivering essential immunisation services, while mechanisms will be put in place for ensuring sustainability.

Major vaccine preventable diseases plaguing Nigerians are polio, cerebrospinal meningitis, yellow fever, etc. Nigeria was the first African country to embark on a house-to-hours immunisation strategy.

According to a recent report on immunisation, this led to the interruption of the transmission of the wild polio virus in most states of the federation, and the enhancement of the quality of health services dud to the improved and tremendous training, and use of a large pool of continuously trained health workers during national and sub-national immunisation days.

There are also evidences of a downward trend of reported epidemic outbreaks, according to the report.

The report shows that the number of cases of measles per 100,000 has reduced from 195 per 100,000 in 1992, to 34 per 100,000 in 2002. Similarly, records show a general downward trend for all the vaccine-preventable diseases - TB 17 per 100,000 (1999) to 7 per 100,000 (2002); Polio 0.31 per 100,000 in 1999 to 0.12 per 100,000 (2002); Neo-natal Tetanus, 2 per 100,000 (1999) to 0.1 per 100,000 (2002).

"There has been no major outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) and yellow fever since 1999 due to several rounds of multi-antigen campaigns" the report said.

The reports also indicate that potent oral polio vaccine have been administered to children 0-59 months during the yearly National Immunisation days, with an increase in the number of children immunised from 21,948,628 in November 1998 to 38,853,531 in November 2002. In addition, vitamin A supplementation has been administered to children 6-59 months during selected rounds of immunisation.