Pentavalent, Pneumonia Vaccines To Follow
DETERMINED to sustain the 5000 percent reduction (from about 50,000 to not more than a 1000) in cases of cerebro-spinal meningitis (CSM) recorded by the country from 2009 and 2011, the Federal Government, in collaboration with Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI) and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will between December 5 and 15, 2011 begin the first ever mass campaign with the new Meningococcal A conjugate vaccine.
The mass campaign is targeted at over 85 million Nigerians living in the 26 meningitis endemic states; with five states — Gombe, Bauchi, Zamfara, Katsina, and Kebbi — set to become the first beneficiaries.
Burkina Fasso and Mali last year became the first African countries to benefit from the vaccine, which was earlier piloted and tested in five African countries and was found to be safe and very efficacious with little or no side effects. Nigeria will be joined by Niger and Chad in the second phase of the CSM campaign starting in December 2011.
Also, the Federal Government, through the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) and under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), plans to introduce a five-in-one vaccine that will take care of diphtheria, pertusis, tetanus, hepatitis B, and haemophilus influenza B (HIB) into the routine immunization schedule from 2012.
The federal government has also got a conditional approval from GAVI to introduce the pneumococcal vaccine (for pneumonia) to address the 15 to 17 per cent of under five mortality and morbidity caused by the bacterium.
Minister of State for Health, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, in an exclusive interview with The Guardian, said: "Nigeria will be introducing some new vaccines and we have got the approval of GAVI to do this introduction. First of all, Nigeria is in the plan for the introduction of the meningococcal A conjugate vaccine (MACV) in the third quarter of this year. The MACV is an improved form of vaccine against CSM. The CSM organism has so many serotypes but the serotype that causes the biggest problem in our environment, about 85 per cent of the cases, is the type A.
"Because of the burden of CSM in the meningitis belt, the African health ministers under a decade ago approached the World Health Organisation (WHO) and partners to help solve the problem and combat the meningococcal meningitis. And the WHO and partners with funding from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation formed the meningitis vaccine project, which was the lead facilitator and the driver of the new vaccine.
"The vaccine has been tried, was field tried and tested in five African countries and found to be very effective with little or no side effects. In 2010 Burkina Faso and Mali became the first countries to benefit from such vaccine, so they had a mass campaign.
"But because of the shear size of the states we are clustering the states into three so that we have phased introduction. We are targeting 18 million people here within the age of zero and 29 years. The second phase will be in 2012 and we will be targeting a few other states. By 2013 we expect that we must have covered all the 26 meningitis states."
Pate said with the introduction of the new meningitis vaccine it is hoped that the disease will eventually become a thing of the past because the vaccine is very effective and the immunity lasts more than 10 years compared to the old version.
The Minister said that the government would eventually look at the possibility of introducing these vaccines into the routine immunization schedule. "We are looking at December campaign for a time phase of between December 5 and December 15, 2011 in these five states," he said.
The Guardian