The Rivers State primary Health Care Management Board has appealed to parents, caregivers, religious organization, proprietors and head of schools to ensure that children between the ages 9 months to 5years are vaccinated in the forth coming nationwide measles vaccination.
Permanent secretary of the board, Dr. Agiriye Harry, disclosed this to newsmen during a one-day media orientation meeting on the importance of the campaign.
Dr. Agiriye, who was represented by the Director of Community Health services, Dr. Isaac Opurum, said that the rate of unimmunized
children in the country is alarming, adding that children from 5years and below are most vulnerable to the disease.
He noted that the vaccine is free, safe and is being carried out by the state government,
stressing that it is a moral obligation of all to ensure no child is left out
during the immunization.
“It’s important that every child should be immunized. Measles is a contagious disease. If a child is not immunized and that child falls ill with measles, it will spread and children not immunized will be affected greatly. Its dangerous. Every child must be immunized.
“We call on Rivers people, every mother, father, caregiver to ensure that every child is immunized within this period”
Also speaking, the state immunization officer, Dr. Rita Wilson, said that children not vaccinated
are at risk of coming down with health challenges.
“It is sad that some women will not get their children vaccinated. This children become vulnerable to situation of the virus itself, such as, blindness, deafness, inflammation of the brain, diarrhoea.
‘’Diarrhea can lead to death, because a child that passes so much fluid will collapse, so these are some of the effect of measles we don’t want our children to come down with”
She said that the measles immunization exercise will commence from 8th to 20th of March, 2018, stressing that parent should go to immunization temporary post and primary health facilities for their children to be vaccinated.
