UNICEF receives vaccines for war newborns

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday that it had received 1.8 million doses of child vaccines and would soon begin an immunisation campaign to vaccinate the more than 120,000 children born in Iraq since the start of the war. A UNICEF spokesman, Allan Dow, told IRIN that none of these newborns had yet been vaccinated due largely to the fact that many primary health-care centres in and around the southern city of Basra had been looted in the aftermath of the war, that fridges had been stolen and the existing vaccine stock had therefore expired. UNICEF said the delivery of the vaccines - for immunisation against polio, tuberculosis, measles, hepatitis and tetanus - had been contingent on the completion of a UNICEF cold-storage facility, which had now been installed at the health ministry building in Basra.