Mozambique: Social assistance covers more households
Mozambique: Fourth round of polio vaccination starts this week
4:32 CAT | 15 Aug 2022
In file CoM
The fourth round of vaccination against polio starts next Thursday in Mozambique.
The campaign will run from 18 – 22 August and will cover children under the age of five.
According to the director of the Expanded Vaccination Programme, at the Ministry of Health, Leonildo Nhampossa, the fourth round takes place at a time when the country has notified, in the central province of Tete, four confirmed cases of wild poliovirus. This strain is believed to have been imported from Malawi.
“We will pay special attention to Tete province, where cases were confirmed in the districts of Changara, Moatize, Tsangano and Magoé, when staff were intensifying surveillance activities for acute flaccid paralysis and carrying out polio vaccination”, he explained.
Even with the adversities brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, Nhampossa says, Mozambique met last year the goal of 95 per cent coverage of childhood vaccination, as recommended in the Economic and Social Plan.
“Families must follow the vaccination schedule in health units, from the birth of the baby to one year of age. This procedure not only prevents the occurrence of various diseases, by increasing immunity, but also aids in the proper development of the child”, he explained.
He stressed that vaccination fundamentally strengthens and stimulates an individual’s immunity and vaccinating a child allows the immune system to be active and have a memory to prevent and fight any kind of invasion by micro-organisms or viruses.
“That is, if the child eventually has any contact with a virus or agent that causes a certain disease, he or she may be in a position to fight it, because the vaccine fundamentally strengthens and stimulates the system”, he explained.
Source: AIM
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