The official said that the campaign will be launched on Friday, in the commune of Calumbo, municipality of Viana. This campaign will comprise two phases, with the first taking place at the end of this week, more specifically until Sunday, and the second scheduled for between the 28th and 30th of June.
According to Helga Freitas, cited by Angop, the vaccination plan will be carried out door to door and in the usual locations, such as health centers, schools, daycare centers and markets.
Therefore, she also left recommendations for parents to take children between the ages of zero and four to vaccination sites or to allow vaccinators to carry out immunization without restrictions when they travel to their homes.
She also said that eradicating polio is a global and Angolan commitment to safeguarding children's health, as well as keeping the country polio-free.
Helga Freitas explained that this campaign arose following the confirmation of the presence of poliovirus resulting from the type 2 vaccine in environmental samples of sewage water collected in the capital, by the Reference Laboratory of the World Health Organization in South Africa, the January 25th of this year, whose isolation took place at a sample collection site for environmental surveillance of the disease in the centrality of Sequele (Cacuaco) in December last year, writes Angop.
Felismina Neto, coordinator of the expanded vaccination program in the province of Luanda, said that logistics has a target group to reach in terms of the number of children and that in Luanda they want to reach approximately 60 percent of immunized children, in order to ensure that the capital is ready to respond to the needs of the target group and the number in question.
Thus, she said that they are carrying out campaigns because there are neighboring countries that have an outbreak of this disease: "We are carrying out campaigns because there are neighboring countries that have an outbreak of polio and due to the mobility of people, the transport of biological agents must be prevented".
Cited by Angop, the person responsible warned that this disease, after entering the body, may not be fatal, but can cause irreversible consequences, so vaccination is the safest way to prevent it, adding that there are no contraindications for children without be immunized and that even if they have been vaccinated with the routine vaccine, they should still receive the campaign vaccine.
More than 11 thousand people are involved and mobilized for this campaign.
It should be remembered that, since 2010, no cases of wild poliovirus have been detected in the capital, with the last notification taking place in Cazenga. According to the person responsible, Luanda has low coverage of vaccination against injectable polio, which means that routines in health infrastructures and other posts need to be reinforced, writes Angop.
On Monday, the Ministry of Health announced the start of the vaccination campaign, stating that it aims to prevent and respond to the occurrence of a case of polio imported from neighboring countries.
