Japan provides two million doses of polio vaccine

Kathmandu, January 19:

The Japanese government today provided around 2 million doses of oral polio vaccine worth $233,000 to the Child Health Division (CHD) of the Ministry of Health. The vaccines will be administered to children under five during the Sub-Intensified National Immunisdation Days on Saturday and Sunday.

“The main objective behind providing the vaccines is to contribute making Nepal free from polio and safeguarding the lives of Nepali children from the crippling disease in the targeted high-risk districts in the Terai,” said Tsutomu Hiraoka, the Japanese ambassador to Nepal.

While handing over the vaccines to the health secretary amid a function here today, Hiraoka hoped that different donors’ efforts would make Nepal and the world free from polio in the near future.

The vaccines will be administered to over 1.8 million children living in the communities of 15 districts of the Eastern, Central and Far-Western Development Regions of the country.

The targeted districts are Jhapa, Morang, Sunsari, Saptari, Siraha, Udaypur, Bara, Chitwan, Dhanusha, Parsa, Rautahat, Sarlahi, Mahottari, Kailali and Kanchanpur.

Ram Chandra Man Singh, secretary at the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP), said the government was committed and concentrating its workforce to achieve the Millennium Development Goals regarding child mortality rate.

“The government will follow the global strategy to eradicate polio from the nation,” Singh said.

Dr Shyam Raj Upreti, chief, Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) section of the Child Health Division, said the government was working as per the global commitment to eradicate polio. “We are in need of more advanced technical support to check the transmission of polio virus from Indian borders to our country,” Dr Upreti said.

Nepal joined the campaign for global polio eradication in 1976. Japan, as a regular partner in the polio eradication campaign, has been providing Nepal with one third of the total requirement of vaccines since 1977. Japan has been assisting Nepal in coordination with various other international donors like the WHO, UNICEF, USAID, DFID, NORAD, the Rotary International and others for the polio eradication programs.

Nepal had almost eradicated polio in 2000 but the disease was the reappeared with the detection of the first case of polio virus in 2004 in the Terai. Similarly, two cases of the disease were detected in Sarlahi in October 2005 and another one case in Rautahat in November 2005.