WHO, UNICEF help in third meningitis vaccination drive

A two-week mass vaccination exercise against meningitis, which kills hundreds of people in West Africa each year, began on Monday in The Gambia. A source in The Ministry of Health in the capital, Banjul, told IRIN the nationwide exercise was “a preventive step against meningitis rather than a response to any outbreak of the disease". About 1.4 million syringes and vaccine doses have been provided. According to a spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO) in The Gambia, WHO has donated 275,000 syringes and 275,000 vaccine doses for the vaccination programme, plus US $1000 to buy fuel for the vaccination teams. The spokesman also told IRIN that the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, had made a similar contribution towards the current campaign in The Gambia, whose population is estimated at about 1.3 million people. Both UN agencies have traditionally supported the Gambian government’s mass health care activities. The exercise, which ends on 22 July, was symbolically launched by President Yahya Jammeh on 4 July at an official ceremony witnessed by the country directors of WHO and UNICEF. Similar campaigns were conducted in 1984 and 1997.