Ministry to roll out polio supplementary vaccination

Deputy Health Minister Enock Phale has announced that the ministry will soon roll out a polio vaccination campaign and administer supplementary vaccinations to children under the age of five.

He said this yesterday when he updated the media on the current Polio outbreak in the country.

Phale said with support from various polio eradication partners, the ministry will also conduct awareness campaigns, among other ways of informing the nation on what to do to combat the spread of the disease.

Said the deputy minister: “Immediately after the President [Lazarus Chakwera] declared the outbreak a National Public Health Emergency, the World Health Organisation  [WHO] started supporting the country to carry out a risk assessment and outbreak response which will include supplemental polio immunisation in the coming weeks.

WHO representative Janet Kayita said to curb the spread of the disease, there is a need to intensify social mobilisation on the importance of getting children immunised and promoting hygiene.

She said: “We need to intensify efforts on immunipation and make sure that every child gets vaccinated and be protected from Polio. In areas where Tropical Storm Ana has affected a lot of households, we need to go there and reach out to those children when the vaccination rolls out, we should not leave any child behind.”

Centres for Disease Control country director Kelsey Mirkovic commended the rapid declaration of a National Public Health Emergency and the strong leadership by the ministry to immediately launch activities to combat the spread.

The last polio case in Malawi was reported in 1992, making the just reported case in Lilongwe District the first in 30 years.

Malawi also obtained a polio-free status in 2005 while the WHO African Region received its polio-free status certificate in 2020.

Health experts in the country have defined these achievements as remarkable milestones in the polio eradication initiative in the country.