Cuba launches National Polio Vaccination Campaign

 

HAVANA, Cuba, Mar 14 (ACN) The 61st edition of the National Oral Polio Vaccination Campaign will begin this Monday throughout the country, in which all children from one month old to two years, 11 months and 29 days of age will be immunized in two phases.

The Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) also informed that the first stage of the campaign will conclude on March 19, with a recovery week from March 21 to 26 for infants who could not be vaccinated in the scheduled period.

The second stage will take place from May 16 to May 21, and the recovery week is scheduled from May 23 to 28, according to the Minsap announcement.

A dose of this immunogen will also be reactivated for nine-year-old children.

For six decades, Cuba has annually immunized its population against poliomyelitis thanks to a national campaign that has been carried out without interruption, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, a precedent that shows the Revolution's decision to preserve the people's health with effective solutions.

Before the triumph of the Revolution in Cuba, poliomyelitis was an endemic disease that each year left some 300 children suffering from paralysis after contracting this ancestral disease, which is estimated to have begun to affect the world more than three thousand years ago.

The American continent was the first to achieve its elimination, and Cuba was the first Latin American country to do so, and in 1995 it received the Certification of Eradication of Poliomyelitis from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

PAHO called on the countries of the Americas to redouble efforts to protect children against polio, whose vaccination rate, in a three-dose schedule, stood at 82 percent in 2020, the lowest since 1994.

This international United Nations agency warned that if immunization coverage is lower than 95 percent in each municipality and community, this disease could once again cause paralytic disease and return to the region.

It noted that 12 countries in 2020 countries reported coverage below 80 percent for the third dose of the vaccine