UN agencies help Togo launch integrated campaign against four childhood diseases

With malaria and measles topping the list of child killers in Africa, the Government of Togo has teamed with the United Nations public health agency and its children’s fund to mount a single integrated campaign to protect children from those diseases, as well as from polio and intestinal worms, starting with 1 million children in the West African country.

The $5.4 million integrated campaign of free vaccines and anti-malarial mosquito bed nets, which started yesterday in Togo and runs through 19 December, involves 1,910 vaccinators and 2,680 volunteers in the effort to reach even those children whose homes are inaccessible by road.

The success of this groundbreaking effort is due to efforts of many partners, including the Togolese Ministry of Health, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Togolese Red Cross, the American Red Cross and the Norwegian Red Cross.

“If widely implemented, these nationwide integrated campaigns may become the single most important step towards reducing child deaths in Africa. Creative new approaches like this are the key to ensuring the survival of thousands,” UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Carol Bellamy said.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook, echoed that theme, saying, “Immunization campaigns can reach almost every child in poor countries. Using them to deliver other life-saving interventions would be a major contribution towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal for reducing child mortality.”

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed at a UN summit in 2000, are designed to halve extreme poverty and its attendant ills by 2015.

Togo, a nation with a population of nearly 5 million and a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $1,608, decreased measles mortality among children by 99 per cent after its 2001 vaccination campaign, even though half of the children born recently are still at risk, WHO and UNICEF said.

The success of the 2001 anti-measles campaign depended on “countrywide immunization days, mobilizing neighbourhood health committees and religious and traditional leaders to encourage mothers to bring their children for vaccination,” the agencies said.

In the present campaign, the incentive is the offer of long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets (LLIN), which, at $2 to $5 each, are too expensive for poor families in Togo. Combating and treating malaria consumes 40 per cent of Togo’s public health expenditure.

The other interventions in the campaign are vaccinations against poliomyelitis, a paralyzing viral disease, and deworming medicine to expel the intestinal parasites which can cause malnutrition, severe anaemia, delayed puberty and learning problems.