Ministry of Health is conducting the fourth round of the Polio vaccination campaign in all districts across the country.
The campaign which is targeting about 3 million children started on Thursday 13th October and it will run up to Sunday 16 October 2022.
The campaign is targeting children aged five years of age irrespective of whether they already got vaccinated during routine immunization clinics of the last three polio vaccination campaign rounds.
In some districts like Mchinji, authorities are expected to vaccinate about 105,700 children.
Health Promotion Officer for Mchinji District Health Office, Happy Mwale told Malawi24 that 247 teams of health workers have been deployed in the district to administer the Polio vaccine and they are optimistic that they will beat the target by Sunday.
“For this fourth round campaign we are targeting 105,700 children in Mchinji. We conducted sensitisation on polio round 4 campaign as a district. By Sunday we hope that we will be through but if we won’t reach our target by Sunday then on Monday we will have a mop up. Our vaccination teams are on the ground and by October 16 we really hope that we will beat the target,” said Mwale.
According to Mwale, in the last phase the district’s coverage was at 102%.
One of the parents of the children that have been vaccinated, Magadalena Phiri from M’gubo village, T/A Zulu in Mchinji district, commended the Ministry of Health for the door to door initiative saying the initiative is good because it is easy and very simple and it does not require so many things like time, money and also transport.
According to Phiri, before the door to door initiative was introduced, they used to travel a long distance to get their children vaccinated and this was costing them a lot of money.
Phiri urged fellow parents to make sure their children have received the polio immunization to prevent them from polio.
All the children who have received the Polio vaccine during the campaign, receive an ink mark on their little finger as a sign that they have been vaccinated.
Two more phases of Polio Vaccination will be conducted this year to control further spread of the disease.
The campaign includes door-to-door strategy to ensure that more children are vaccinated.
Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (for example, contaminated water or food) and multiplies in the intestine. Initial symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness of the neck and pain in the limbs.
