Minister of Health, Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda has challenged women in the country to take the lead in vaccinating their under 15 children against Polio.
Chiponda was speaking on Wednesday in Blantyre when she graced the official launch of the 2023 round one polio vaccination campaign targeting 9 million children.
“Let me take this advantage to remind mothers and guardians that polio is communicable, you get it through ingestion of food and liquids, so the other thing we want to encourage are the issues of hygiene.
“Now polio is like the third disease where we are encouraging hygiene, remember we had cholera and we need to increase our hygiene levels. We need to take care of issues of washing hands and how we prepare our food and water,” she said.
The health minister said previous campaigns managed to vaccinate around 3 million children of under 5 years, saying now with guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO) the targeted age has increased to 15 years because Blantyre registered a polio case of a 14-year-old child.
In her remarks, WHO Country Representative, Dr. Neema Kimambo said the campaign is important to Malawi and globally, saying Polio transmission needs to be interrupted.
She said: “We have seen that Mozambique which is the neighboring country with Malawi has had many cases of Polio virus, we all know there is a lot of movement across the borders as such with such movements if children in Malawi are exposed and yet they are not covered with vaccine then they are likely also get polio”.
The door-to-door 2023 Round 1 oral Polio Vaccination campaign will run for four days.
Reported by Chilungamo Missi
