The Rotary Club of Nigeria, Owerri District, has vaccinated at least five thousand infants and children in Imo State against poliomyelitis.
Development Diaries reports that the gesture was in commemoration of 2023 World Polio Day and the determined effort of the Rotary Club to help eradicate the disease in the state.
Speaking at one of the venues for the vaccination, the District 9142 Polio Plus Chair, Sabastain Okwu, and representative of Rotary Family Health Days, Chika Ogubuire, emphasised that in order to entirely remove the disease from the world, ongoing public awareness campaigns are necessary.
They reiterated that the Rotary Club International, in partnership with the United Nations, is committed to preventing the disease in children and to stepping up efforts to create a society free of polio.
‘You will recall that from 1988, over 250 countries were endemic for poliomyelitis and every year, 350, 000 children are paralysed. So a bold step has to be taken’, Okwu said.
‘Since polio is not curable but it is entirely preventable, there has to be a programme or project to immunise children and protect them against the disease. And that is what we, the Rotracts have been doing’.
Nigeria was declared free of wild polio in 2020, but there are still fears about the spread of the crippling disease caused by the circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus.
The country reported 170 additional cases in 2022 after notifying 1,028 cases in 2021. 51 instances have been reported so far in six states this year, clearly confined to the three states of Zamfara, Sokoto, and Kebbi, according to data from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Photo source: The Guardian
