Agency Decries Number Of Unimmunized Children

The National Primary Health Care Development Agency has expressed concern over the large number of unimmunised children in the country.

Speaking at a two-day routine immunisation stakeholders’ meeting in Enugu, the Chief Medical Officer of the agency, Dr Mahmud Zubair, said some 3.2 million children were not immunised in 2012.

Zubair, who is also the head of routine immunisation in the agency, said the development was raising the risk of disease outbreaks.

He said that 250,000 children from the South-East geo-political zone were part of the figure.

On her part, the South-East Zonal Coordinator of the agency, Dr Ngozi Nwosu, expressed regrets that in spite of the Federal Government’s efforts to improve routine immunisation services, its coverage had not improved remarkably.

Nwosu told the stakeholders that the agency was charged with the responsibility of supporting states and local governments in their implementation of primary health care services to bring health closer to all people, especially at the grassroots.

She said it was to effectively carry out this function in the area of routine immunisation that the Federal Government procured potent vaccines for infants and pregnant women and distributed them to all states and local government areas.

She said that since last year, Nigeria had gone the extra mile of introducing the new pentavalent vaccine to reduce the risk of infants and young children dying from pneumonia and meningitis.

Nwosu said that in spite of the efforts, routine immunisation coverage had not improved but gone from high levels of between 85 per cent and 90 per cent in the 1990s to less than 51 per cent in 2012.

While soliciting the assistance of all the stakeholders, she insisted that the agency alone could not improve routine immunisation services.

Nwosu also pointed out that there was a need to find ways to guarantee permanent uptake of routine immunisation services in the communities, local government areas and states.