Breaking Polio transmission: Over one million children to be vaccinated in Ashanti

The Ghana Health Service and its partners are embarking on another Polio Vaccination Campaign as they seek to break the transmission of the disease in Ghana.In the Ashanti Region, the Regional Health Directorate is targeting 1,042,361 children in the first round of the campaign scheduled for Thursday, October 17th to Sunday, October 20.Mobile vaccination teams would be deployed to schools, homes and public places to immunise children under five years across all the 43 districts in the region.Dr. Fred Adomako-Boateng, the Ashanti Regional Director of Health Services, who announced this at a media launch of the campaign in Kumasi, said Polio mostly affected children under five years, and that one in 200 infections could lead to irreversible paralysis.He said five to 10 per cent of those paralysed due to the disease were likely to die because of difficulty in breathing, the Regional Director disclosed.'Though we have been able to address the wild types of viruses in the environment, we have not yet ac hieved our major objective of eradicating all forms of Polio viruses,' he said.Dr. Adomako-Boateng explained that although type two and three of Polio had been eliminated across the world, but type one was still endemic in only two countries in the world namely- Afghanistan and Pakistan.The Regional Director however stated that, the agenda of eradicating Polio was in jeopardy, with current happening of outbreaks of Vaccine-Derived Polio viruses.He said 90 circulating Vaccine-Derived Polio Type Two cases including environmental surveillance isolates had been recorded since 2019.'For these 90 circulating viruses that we isolated, 19 circulating Vaccine-Derived Polio cases were documented in 2019, with 12 of them recorded in 2020, and three in 2022,' he said.He underscored the need for all stakeholders to get involved in the vaccination campaign to ensure that at least 95 per cent of all children in the country and particularly in Ashanti were covered.This, he noted, was important because recently on September 6 this year, the Ghana Health Service was notified of a confirmed circulating Vaccine-Derived Polio Type Two isolate from the Koforidua Environmental Surveillance Site.He said the sequencing results indicated that the virus was genetically linked to a virus isolate in Algeria, a situation which suggested that all children under five in the country were at risk of Polio.He stated that to be able kick Polio out of Ghana, there was the need to break this transmission.Source: Ghana News Agency