Yellow fever vaccination campaign starts in southwest

Health officials began a drive to vaccinate the population of Bobo Dioulasso against yellow fever at the weekend after four cases of the disease were confirmed in Burkina Faso's second largest city earlier this year. Officials said the vaccination campaign kicked off on Saturday. It was expected to last five days and cover about 840,000 people in and around the city, they added. "We are going to vaccinate everybody from six months old upwards," Francis Drabo, the acting regional health director told national radio. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had called for immediate mass vaccination in the area around Bobo Dioulasso, 360 km southwest of the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou, after four confirmed cases of yellow fever were reported there in April. The Geneva-based body said the risk of epidemics was high because yellow fever vaccination coverage in the city was reckoned to be low at about 60 percent. Recent immunisation campaigns had targeted children under five and there had been no major effort to inoculate the adult population of Burkina Faso since 1984, WHO officials said. Yellow fever comes from a virus that is common in monkeys. It occurs in tropical areas of Africa and South America and is generally transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. In its mildest form, the disease leads to an illness similar to influenza but severe case can lead to hepatitis, haemorrhagic fever and death. WHO was worried that with the onset of the rainy season, mosquito numbers would increase sharply and the disease would spread. Bobo Dioulasso is an important market town involved in flourishing trade with nearby Cote D'Ivoire, Mali and Ghana. WHO feared that the yellow fever outbreak might therefore reach these countries. The Burkinabe government subsequently appealed to donors for about 900,000 doses of the yellow fever vaccine, which cost around 515 million CFA (nearly US$ 1 million). Last year a separate outbreak of yellow fever occurred near the Ghanaian border in the town of Gaoua, 180 km southeast of Bobo Dioulasso. Between September 2003 and February 2004, four cases were confirmed, prompting the government to vaccinate 150,000 people in the area.