Ministry of Health launches the first national vaccination campaign against polio for 2022

Today, the Ministry of Health launched the first national vaccination campaign against polio for the year 2022, which will continue until the 10th of this month and targets children from one day to five years old, regardless of previous vaccinations.

The campaign aims to reach about 2.7 million children in various governorates, and it is implemented through 977 health centers and 2450 mobile teams, with the participation of 10,210 health personnel, while taking precautionary measures to prevent the Corona virus.

Head of Damascus Health Directorate, Dr. Muhammad Samer Shahrour, confirmed that the vaccine is safe, effective and recommended by the World Health Organization, stressing that the vaccine protects the child and society from dangerous polio disease, which leads to permanent disability or death. 

Dr. Rita Asaad underlined the importance of the campaign to prevent new epidemics and pandemics of polio.

It is noteworthy that Syria was declared free of polio for the first time in 1995, then returned in 2013 through infections with a Pakistani wild virus that was carried by armed terrorist groups. So the Ministry of Health launched a series of national vaccination campaigns that succeeded in interrupting the transmission of the virus, and no new case has been reported since the beginning of 2014. But the disease returned in June 2017, after infections with a mutated virus were recorded in Deir ez-Zor. Then the vaccination campaignscontinued until the World Health Organization announced at the end of 2018 that Syria was once again free of polio.

Inas Abdulkareem