Campaign begins to curb Kabul's great child killer: measles
By Peter Foster
(Filed: 11/01/2002)

IN a country where one in four children dies before reaching the age of five, health education programmes in Afghanistan have no time for niceties.

A man with a megaphone walks through a poor area of Kabul calling mothers to their doors and showing them pictures of children who have been left disfigured by polio and encephalitis.

The message is brutally clear: neglect to bring your children to the local mosque for a free vaccination and they will end up like those in the photographs.

A coalition of groups, led by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, and the World Health Organisation, began a three-month campaign this week to vaccinate nine million Afghan children against measles. The programme will cost £5.5 million.

Although a negligible threat in the developed world, in Afghanistan, where almost half of all families do not receive the vaccines they need, measles is still a leading killer of children.

In the Shahrara district of Kabul, where many families cannot afford an aspirin to treat a headache, the queue at the mosque was over a hundred deep at lunchtime.

Many children arrived clutching younger siblings, unaccompanied by their parents, to receive a jab from Dr Allawdin Ammar. He had already administered 450 injections that morning.

Each one is ticked off by a health worker, Zarmina Arozomand, who was a teacher before the Taliban rose to power and now wears her gold earrings, leather jacket and red lipstick with pride.

Until the schools reopen in the spring, she is helping with the drive to educate poorer families about the need for vaccines. "Many of these families cannot afford medicine or treatment for their children so we explain that the vaccines will keep them from being sick," she said.

During one of his regular cigarette breaks, Dr Ammar, who trained in Tajikistan after fleeing the fighting in Afghanistan in 1992, says he hopes a prolonged peace will enable the country to follow the West in eradicating diseases such as polio.