Children immunised against measles in unsecured rebel stronghold

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday it had immunised 27,000 children against measles in Grand Cape Mount county, a rebel-held area near the Sierra Leone border where UN peacekeepers have not yet been deployed. Nuhu Maksha and Boubacar Dieng, two doctors working with UNICEF in Liberia, told IRIN they had negotiated access to the area with leaders of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement and had carried out the first stage of a measles immunsation campaign there from 26-31 January. "We immunized children from the ages of 6 months to 15 years in three out of the six districts in Grand Cape Mount County and we initially targeted 27,000, but we exceeded our target with 27,641 children receiving the measles vaccines", Dr Maksha explained. The doctors said that they had not experienced any problems working in the rebel-controlled area, though security fears were holding back the measles immunisation campaign elsewhere in the country. "We are targeting 1.4 million children for this campaign throughout Liberia, but access and logistics are our only hindrance so far and there are enough vaccines in stock for this programme", Dr Maksha noted. UN peacekeepers are pushing out from the capital, Monrovia, but have only deployed as far west as Tubmanburg, 60 km north of the capital Monrovia, in Bomi County. Grand Cape Mount lies between Bomi county and the Sierra Leone border. Dr Dieng told IRIN that a further 20,000 children would be immunised against measles, a highly contagious and potentially fatal childhood disease, in Grand Cape Mount within the next 3 weeks. Dr Maksha said about 780,000 children had been vaccinated against measles in what he called "accessible counties" of Liberia since August - most of them in and around Monrovia. Fourteen years of near constant civil war were officially brought to an end on the 18th of August with the signing of a peace agreement following months of talks in Ghana. However, since then, there have been reports of continued fighting in parts of the Liberian countryside that have yet to be secured by UN peacekeeping forces. The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), currently has just over 10,000 peacekeeping troops on the ground. Jacques Klein, the UN Special Representative to Liberia, said last week that UNMIL would reach its full strength of 15,000 troops by the end of February or early March.