Six communities in B/A selected for national polio immunization

Berekum (B/A) Aug. 18, GNA - Six communities in the Brong-Ahafo Region have been selected to benefit from the forthcoming national immunization exercise against poliomyelitis (Polio).

They are Berekum and Dormaa Municipalities, and Dormaa East, Jaman North, Jaman South and Tain Districts.

Mr. Stephen Anane, Disease Control Officer at the Berekum Municipal Health Directorate, who disclosed this in an interview with Ghana News Agency in Berekum, said the three-day exercise would begin next Friday.

He said the exercise formed part of the sub-national immunization days programme targeted at particularly 36 areas of districts sharing borders with La Cote d'Ivoire. Mr Anane explained that the first exercise, organised recently, was suspended in those areas because of political crisis in neighbouring La Cote d' Ivoire.

He said upon the advice of the World Health Organisation, a different polio vaccine known as Mono-Vaccine (Type 3) would be applied instead of the types one and two vaccines used during the last exercise.

Mr. Anane said the immunization has targeted infants between Zero and 11 months old and those between 12 and 59 months, and gave the assurance that personnel for the exercise would move from house-to-house.

He said that a research proved that six acute flaccid paralysis cases detected in those areas during the Ivorian political crisis, were confirmed positive, and appealed to parents in the selected areas to make their children available for the immunization.