Measles vaccination campaign launched

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Tuesday launched a countrywide vaccination campaign against measles - one of the deadliest of preventable diseases - which claims the lives of at least 35,000 children each year in Afghanistan. "The measles vaccination campaign has begun. It's going on in Kabul from Tuesday," a UNICEF spokesman, Chulho Hyun, told IRIN on Wednesday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. He said the target was to vaccinate 1.2 million children throughout the Kabul region. Hyun said the campaign would later be taken to other parts of the country to immunise a total of nine million children, though an exact time-frame for each region was not immediately available. "Over the course of the next three months, it will continue in other areas of the country, reaching children in the most difficult areas to access, as well as displaced children," Hyun told a news briefing in Islamabad on Monday. Measles is a leading cause of childhood deaths, and killed over three-quarters of a million children worldwide in 2000, according to UNICEF figures. UNICEF said it threatened to kill even more children in Afghanistan this year due to the humanitarian catastrophe there, the high displacement level of people, extreme poverty, cold and prolonged malnutrition. "Since it is very easily spread, epidemics occur, especially in places where people live in poverty and in overcrowded conditions. Severe measles cases are especially likely to occur among poorly nourished children," Hyun explained. Ribka Amsalu, a medical coordinator with Medecins Sans Frontieres, told IRIN last week that measles had broken out in three makeshift refugee camps in southwestern Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, although nobody had died. UNICEF says fewer than 40 percent of Afghan children get the vaccines they need to help them survive childhood diseases such as measles. Hyun said past measles immunisation campaigns had been hampered by lack of funds, conflict, and shortage of trained personnel. "Among all vaccine-preventable diseases, measles is the largest killer of children in Afghanistan," he added. A WHO statement issued in Islamabad on Tuesday said that mothers were very enthusiastic and committed to immunise their children. "There was a great rush as campaign posts opened for vaccination," the statement added. Meanwhile, WHO, UNICEF and partner nongovernmental organisations met on Tuesday to discuss a strategy for the implementation of the measles immunisation campaign in the northern Konduz and Takhar provinces of Afghanistan.