Mother and child health campaign begins

Burundi began on Monday a weeklong health protection campaign targeting over three million children and 17,000 pregnant women, in an effort to reduce the country's high infant and maternal mortality rates. During the campaign, medical teams are due to deworm an estimated three million children aged from one year to 14 years; provide vitamin A for another one million infants aged from six months to 59 months; immunise 17,000 pregnant women against tetanus, and distribute mineral salts and folic acid to them. In a statement read on state radio and television on Sunday, Public Health Minister Dr Jean Kamana appealed to the public to participate in the campaign in large numbers "to give their children a chance to survive". Kamana said Burundi was among 45 countries that had delayed the implementation of plans to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015. He said many Burundian children died of preventable diseases and that the country risked failing to meet the 2015 target if nothing was done to redress the situation. Dr Kamana said this week's campaign, supported by UNICEF and the UN World Health Organization, was part of the strategy the country had chosen to speed up the reduction of infant and maternal mortality rates. According to Dr Daniel Verna, a programme administrator in charge of health and nutrition for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Burundi, out of every 300,000 Burundian infants, some 57,000 do not live beyond five years. "This is an unbearable silent tragedy," Verna told provincial governors and health directors last week during a preparatory meeting for the immunisation campaign. Verna said some 100,000 children aged up to one year who have not been immunised against certain diseases would get an opportunity this week to be protected against ailments such as measles, tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria and tetanus.