By Bashir Mohammed
Kano
A Kano based Social Mobilisation Consultant and a representative of the World Health Organisation in Kano, Hajiya Hasana Waziri, has described donor agencies as real partners in the fight against measles in Nigeria.
Speaking at a Town Hall meeting with the media and some select groups of Community Based Organisations, held in Kano, Waziri said the menace of measles had taken a heavy toll on the lives of children between the ages of one to five, adding that they were simply vulnerable in the absence of routine immunisation.
She said the rapid spread of the deadly virus had drastically reduced as a result of massive public campaign and adequate awareness by medical authority over the years with the massive financial support of some notable international agencies adding that the child killer disease had now resurfaced in some parts of the country.
She, however, stressed that measles was a fast spreading disease due to its communicable nature and that the virus was easily contracted by children mixing with the patient affected.
According to her the international development partners were very much concerned about the dismal pace the disease was killing children in countries it had ravaged stressing however that they were ever ready to inject more funds into the immunisation project to check its proliferation.
She further revealed that the current immunisation exercise was different from the polio immunisation where house to house operation was conducted, saying those to administer the vaccine were to be stationed at a strategic location to receive the children to be immunised.
She called on parents to fully cooperate with the medical personnel assigned to handle the task by bringing their wards to the centres designated affirming that only routine vaccination could eradicate the menace totally.
