$58m contribution to prevent contagious disease in West Africa

Accra, May 16, GNA - The effort to contain the deadly yellow fever disease received a boost on Wednesday with the launch of a "Yellow Fever Initiative" backed by a 58-million dollar contribution from the GAVI Alliance.

GAVI is a member of the Yellow Fever Partnership launched in 2006 which now includes WHO, UNICEF, Medicins Sans Frontiers, among others. Launched during the World Health Assembly currently meeting in Geneva, the new initiative will support special immunization campaigns in a dozen West African countries with high risk of yellow fever epidemics, a statement from the World Health Organisation, signed by Miss Sophia Twum Barima, the Information Officer said.

The grant sponsored by WHO and its partners will help beneficiary countries-Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, C=F4te d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo-- create a stockpile of 11 million doses of vaccine. Together with WHO the countries will identify specific target populations to vaccinate, with the aim of both preventing outbreaks and managing epidemics, and consequently increasing immunization coverage.

Yellow Fever almost disappeared between the 1940s and 1960s, with widespread mass vaccination campaigns in some African countries. However, as immunization campaigns waned, a generation of people grew up with no immunity to the disease, and by the 1990s the number of annual cases rose to an estimated 200 000 per year, with 30 000 deaths. The statement said the disease had returned as a major scourge and, as urbanization progressed across Africa, the threat of a major epidemic loomed ever larger with a WHO estimates that the highly transmissible disease could infect around one-third of an urban population in Nigeria alone.

The 58 million dollars for immunization against Yellow Fever to be kick-started over the next four years would help the world's 12 highest-burden countries, all of which are in West Africa to implement special vaccination campaigns to immunize more than 48 million people. "The Initiative is a groundbreaker from many perspectives. Existing routine immunization programmes target children. If we were to do only routine child immunization for Yellow Fever, we would need decades to reduce the risk of epidemics and the international spread of the disease," said Dr. David Heymann, WHO Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases.

"Now, however, thanks to the generous grant from GAVI, the 'Yellow Fever Initiative' will be able to vaccinate at-risk populations and thus quickly reduce the risk of devastating outbreaks that could otherwise threaten the region and the world. With this initiative, we will be working in the short- and long-term to strengthen primary health care systems in the world's most vulnerable region- Africa," added Dr Mike Ryan, Director of the WHO Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR) in Geneva.

"Yellow fever is a particularly dangerous disease which kills up to 50 percent of those with severe illness. Every age group is at risk, and vaccination is our crucial weapon to prevent cases and epidemics. With the GAVI Alliance contribution, affected countries have an exceptional opportunity, and responsibility, to protect their populations," according to Michel Zaffran, Deputy Executive Secretary at the GAVI Alliance.

Mr Zaffran who announced the GAVI contribution said, "GAVI is committed to working with all our partners, both globally and in the field, to ensure the success of the Yellow Fever Initiative in Africa." Until now, vaccine has often been too expensive for countries to afford when faced with a host of competing health problems and coverage rates in some West African countries are critically low. In Nigeria, for example, the coverage rate in 2005 was an estimated 36 per cent. However, it is recommended that, to stop Yellow Fever infections from spreading into an epidemic, immunization coverage must be at least 60-80 per cent.

Dr Sylvie Brian d, Project Manager of the Yellow Fever Initiative in WHO's EPR Department, said, "Immunization against Yellow Fever is all the more critical now because of increased population movements in Africa. As we see more people moving to cities for work, but returning to their rural villages from time to time, we also see the possibility of Yellow Fever epidemics multiplying".

Yellow Fever is an acute, haemorrhagic, viral disease that is transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes. There is no known specific antiviral therapy, although the disease can be prevented by the "17D" vaccine, which provides immunity for at least 10 years. The disease is endemic in tropical regions of Africa and South America, where 44 countries (33 in Africa and 11 in South America) are considered to be at risk. Currently, 610 million people are considered to be at risk from the disease in Africa.