Focus on nationwide measles campaign

Kenya launched a countrywide measles vaccination campaign on Monday in what is considered the first major step towards eradicating the highly contagious childhood disease, which kills an estimated 18,000 children a year in the country. The week-long campaign, supported by five international donors, is intended to reach some 14 million Kenyan children between the ages of nine months and 14 years. As the campaign entered its third day on Wednesday, organisers reported that they had begun to record success in mobilising the public to participate in the immunisation exercise. Abbas Gullet, Secretary-General of the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS), told a news conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, that indications were of a fairly good turnout in both rural and urban areas. "We had to do social mobilisation," he said. "It has not been easy in some places. We trained volunteers beforehand on how to conduct a door-to-door campaign in the districts - and the feedback is good." The vaccination campaign is being administered by the Ministry of Health, through its Kenya Expanded Programme for Immunisation (KEPI), in conjunction with KRCS, which has fielded 10,000 volunteers across the country to get people to bring their children for vaccination. At least 6,000 Red Cross volunteers have been sent, in addition to health workers, to six especially difficult districts known to have had low previous immunisation coverage for varied reasons. These include Machakos, with a vast rural area southeast of Nairobi, and the remote Tana River area, in eastern Kenya; Rachuonyo in the west, where a high number of cases of neonatal tetanus infections is also being targeted; Nyeri in central Kenya, which has pockets of resistance; the largely nomadic northeastern district of Garissa; and the Kibera slum area of Nairobi, according to KRCS. Current measles immunisation coverage in Kenya stands at between 60 and 70 percent, but coverage needs to be at least 95 percent to bring the disease under control, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Although the number of severe measles infections has fallen in the past 10 years, Kenya has continued to record measles outbreaks among children of older age groups and even adults. Nicholas Alipui, the UNICEF country director, said on Wednesday that the campaign, which came barely a month after the UN Special Session on Children launched, was a "historic" event in Kenya, aiming at reaching children even in the most remote parts of the country. "It is unacceptable that any child should die of a preventable disease," Alipui said. "Measles is a preventable disease. At a cost of one dollar per child, the measles vaccine is the most cost-effective primary health-care intervention a country can make." "The right to good health is the entitlement of every child," Alipui added. "We are aiming at 100 percent coverage to meet our obligation as duty-bearers to each and every child - including those in hard-to-reach pastoralist communities, those in refugees camps and children who live on the streets." The KEPI manager, Stanley Sonoiya, told the same news conference that Kenya was confident of success in the measles campaign, which has drawn lessons from the successes recorded on previous mass immunisation campaigns - the first aimed at eradicating smallpox in 1977 and, more recently, those aimed at eradicating polio. After the latter campaigns, there has been no single recorded case of wild polio virus in the country since 1984, according to Sonoiya. "We are confident that Kenya and its partners will be equally successful and focused in tackling the National Measles Control initiative as part of the national plan of action," he added. Peter Ariki, country representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO), told the news conference that Kenya had strong routine immunisation and disease surveillance systems that made measles control and eventual elimination in the country possible. "We can affirm that this mass vaccination campaign is, indeed, the beginning of the countdown to the end of measles in Kenya," he said. All partners in the initiative have emphasised the need for the public to be involved if the goal of measles eradication is to be achieved, and campaign organisers have American actress Jane Seymour in-country this week to try to raise its profile among ordinary Kenyans. Seymour, celebrity cabinet member of the American Red Cross, travelled to Kenya with a group of eight American students (aged 11 to 14 years) to participate in the campaign, and urged all the country's parents, guardians and teachers to bring children under their care for vaccination. "As a mother of six, it saddens me greatly that so many vulnerable children are dying needless deaths from a disease that can be so easily prevented," she said. "In America, where measles has been eliminated, mothers no longer have to worry about their children getting sick and dying from this extremely contagious and deadly disease. We aim to make to make Kenya measles-free as well," she added.