Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) weekend said the target needed for immunisation is 600 million syringes for vaccination.
The Director General of Africa CDC, Dr. Jean Kaseya, stated this while speaking to journalists at the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) headquarters. Abuja.
He said the Africa CDC supports the agenda of local manufacturing of syringes in Africa.
He added that to support the regional, local and national bodies like National Regulatory Authority and other bodies is to enable them to provide quality assurance of the product.
“We don’t want to see again Africa importing syringes for the vaccination of our children, our mother and all other people who needs it,” he stressed.
The Africa CDC also approved what it calls the Continental Food Procurement Mechanism and the mechanism will help to make the Nigeria product available to all 54 countries in Africa.
Dr Kaseya added that Africa needs people with experience on local manufacturing and identify people who can go for training everywhere to get some knowledge and come back to the continent and support the agenda.
He said: “Nigeria is importing 2 billion syringes for health system and in Africa we need to import 20 billion syringes.”
In her remarks, the UNICEF Country Representative, Christian Munduate, who was represented by the Deputy Representative, UNICEF, Dr. Rownak Khan, stated that we are in support of local manufacturers of syringes which will reduce cost drastically.
She said every state has a cold chain technician that are hired by government and we have partners who are also supporting the cold chain technician and providing day- to- day technical support and then the government taking responsibility, but as one of the technical partners, it has long standing experiences in cold chain equipment.
Dr. Khan however states that it provides support to each of the states so the cold chains are regularly maintained.
