The government has pledged to fight tooth and nail to ensure that outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases are contained.
The Immunisation and Vaccine Development Programme Manager, Dr Dafrossa Lyimo exclusively told the ‘Sunday News’ that the government was worried to see outbreaks when investment is put on vaccination to prevent diseases and death.
“If there is an outbreak it means either the child has not being vaccinated at all or the vaccination schedule wasn’t complete. As of now, it is only measles which is a vaccine preventable disease that still has outbreaks,” she said.
Dr Dafrossa explained that the World Health Organisation had decided to introduce a second dose of the measles vaccination to help boost immunity.
Around the world, measles deaths fell by 78 per cent between 2000 and 2008, from an estimated 750,000 to 164,000 per year, according to the Measles & Rubella Initiative, a global partnership committed to ensuring no child dies from measles or is born with congenital rubella syndrome.
She, howeve, cautioned that this introduction needed to go hand in hand with parents /care takers’ commitment to taking their children to get vaccinated lest continuing seeing the re-emergence of vaccine preventable diseases which were not for a long time like polio, diphtheria and whooping cough.
“The vaccine for measles when given as a single dose only provides 80 per cent immunity to 100 children vaccinated and it is for this reason that after every three years, a measles campaign is conducted to help boost the immunity. “The measles second dose will also boost immunity and will reduce the outbreaks we are observing but it needs to be stressed that this will only happen if all children come for vaccination and we encourage that as campaigns and treating measles cases is very expensive.
The World Health Assembly has a vision of eliminating measles by 2020,” she said. Shedding more light on how the vaccines will be dispensed, she said that second dose will be given to a child at 18 months and plans were underway of dispensing it starting next year.
An epidemiologist from the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Mr Elibariki Mwakapeje said that outbreaks from vaccine preventable diseases has been baffling them for a while now particularly with measles but were now looking forward to second dose.
Mr Mwakapeje said that what was most puzzling about the reappearance of these diseases was the fact that vaccination targets for consecutive years had been surpassed but the outbreaks still came.
“Over time we have been pointing our fingers at the quality of the vaccines but mostly we blamed on Tanzanian parents not having the culture of safekeeping records of their children during the early ages and contracting the disease when the child is slightly grown up and living with a guardian,” he said.
Dr Dafrossa countered this notion saying that it was actually not poor record keeping, but data collection tools which include the inadequacy of new vaccine in some facilities.
She said that it was also due to the workload of staff at primary health care where sometimes don’t enter data immediately after the services has been provided. “
We have several methods of checking to ensure children are vaccinated, including monitoring of vaccine use, use of child health cards to look when a child was brought to hospital for any intervention and also a coverage survey is being used to monitor our vaccination
coverage,” she explained.
By MASEMBE TAMBWE, Tanzania Daily News
