UNICEF launches "major campaign" against measles

UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund, launched on Tuesday what it described as "a major campaign" to vaccinate 3.5 million children against measles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). "The six-day campaign will push to vaccinate children aged six months to 15 years in North Kivu and Eastern Kasai," UNICEF reported from Geneva. The agency said it had already supplied materials worth US $280,000 for the operation. Measles is the second-biggest killer of children in the DRC, where 54 per cent of children have not been vaccinated against the disease, UNICEF said. So far in 2002, it added, some 222 deaths had been registered out of 26,000 cases treated in DRC health centres. During 2003, UNICEF said, it aimed to vaccinate 28.5 million children against measles across the country. It said measles was the most deadly of the many vaccine-preventable diseases that kill children in the developing world. In 2000, it added, the disease had killed 777,000 children, most of them under five years of age, in the developing world.