Staff Correspondent
Twenty-two million children under five will be administered polio vaccines as the second round of 17th National Immunisation Day will be held today.
Field workers from the health and family planning ministry along with six lakh volunteers will administer oral polio vaccines to 22 million children aged 0-59 months and Vitamin A capsule to nearly 21 million children aged 12-59 months at 140,000 sites across the country.
Besides, the volunteers will conduct a four-day house-to-house search to make sure that no child is left out of polio vaccination.
The government with the support from UNICEF, World Health Organisation, Rotary International and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta) mounted a model response to immunizing the children across the country when the first case of polio was detected in March, 2006 after an absence of five years.
Eighteen polio cases were thereafter detected in 12 districts of the country’s all divisions with the last one reported on November 22, 2006.
As the NIDs restarted, the government decided to integrate National Vitamin A-Plus Campaign with NIDs.
The government will give Vitamin A capsule with polio vaccine in this round with support from Canadian International Development Agency, Micronutrient Initiative, UNICEF, and WHO.
Vitamin A deficiency poses a major threat to the health and survival of children and mothers. It increases the risk of child deaths from diseases such as measles and diarrhoea.
These infections contribute to over 25 per cent of deaths among children aged 1-5 years in Bangladesh.
Since the detection of the polio virus in 2006, there have been six rounds of polio NIDs in 2006 and four rounds in 2007 and in each round, it reached between 95 per cent and 98.2 per cent of under-five children in the country.
Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus which attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy and deformation and in some cases even death.
Courtesy: newagebd.com
