For seven days, all Member States of WHO in the African Region – island states, landlocked countries and those in coastal regions – will be busy organizing a range of activities including high-level immunization campaigns and public education and information-sharing events in observance of the third edition of the African Vaccination Week.
The regional launching ceremony will be organized in Uganda, a country that is set to introduce the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine into its national routine immunization schedule to avert infant and child deaths due to pneumonia.
The theme of this year’s African Vaccination Week celebration is “Save lives. Prevent disabilities. Vaccinate.”
“We are delighted with the high and growing profile of the African Vaccination Week which is yet another opportunity for us to underscore the proven life-saving power of vaccines, and to encourage vaccination of children, adolescents and adults against deadly diseases”, says WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis Sambo.
“This burgeoning partnership between WHO, Governments, partners, and other stakeholders is helping countries to sustain political commitment to vaccination and lay a solid foundation for a participatory culture of prevention and health promotion in Member States”, Dr Sambo adds.
Like the two previous editions of the AVW, (in 2011 and 2012), the 2013 edition will also serve several purposes: it will raise awareness on the life-saving value of immunization; seek to increase vaccination coverage; reach underserved and marginalized communities (particularly those living in remote areas, deprived urban settings and strife-torn areas with existing and new available high impact child survival packages); reinforce the medium and long term benefits of immunization and other child survival interventions, and help transform the lives of millions of children, giving them a chance to grow up healthy, go to school, and improve their life prospects.
Other activities planned by countries include: delivery of life-saving interventions (e.g. introduction of new vaccines like pneumococcal or rotavirus vaccines), vitamin A supplementation, deworming medicines for intestinal worms, distribution of Long Lasting Insecticide Treated Nets, ‘catch up’ activities with routine vaccines in lower performing districts, polio and measles campaigns, and screening of children for missed opportunities and for moderate or severe malnutrition
Participating countries will also embark on mobilization and sensitization campaigns using traditional, modern and social media, engage religious leaders where relevant, organize sensitization workshops for media practitioners and health workers, among others; conduct community dialogues through panel discussions, recognize deserving health workers through award of certificates, and sensitize supervisors as well as undertake supportive supervisory visits to vaccination sites. These activities have a common, overarching goal: to showcase the power of vaccination in protecting public health.
With the institutionalization of AVW and the momentum it is now gaining, the achievements realized during the last two editions would seem to portend greater success for the future. For example, records available at WHO show that during the celebration of the Week in the last two years, access to vaccines improved especially in hard-to-reach communities with more than 150 million people vaccinated with oral polio vaccine in 13 countries.
It is worth noting here that Eritrea, which impresses the global health community with its recent successes in health development, tagged its 2012 campaign the “National Child Health, Nutrition and Vaccination Week” and listed as one of its objectives the vaccination of “at least 95 % of children 9 to 47 months against measles.” Obviously, adults, not just children, stand to benefit from immunization which has been described in glowing terms by public health experts as “one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions”, preventing between two and three million deaths every year.
“Both infants and senior citizen stand to benefit from immunization”, Tanzania’s Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Dr Hussein Mwinyi, told participants at the fourth meeting of the Annual Regional Conference on Immunization in December 2012. “Immunization is an important component of health systems and a key strategy to reducing child mortality, improve maternal health and combat diseases. It is for this reason that we need to work together as a region to reach all children with immunization services in Africa”, Dr. Mwinyi added.
As Member States gear up to celebrate AVW 2013, WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Luis G. Sambo, expresses the hope that through the annual celebration of the African Vaccination Week, WHO, Governments and other stakeholders will be contributing significantly to the realization of the vision for the Decade of Vaccines (2011–2020): “a world in which all individuals and communities enjoy lives free from vaccine-preventable diseases”.