Health Ministry launches national anti-polio vaccination campaign

The Ministry launched today the first national anti-polio vaccination campaign for 2020. The campaign, which will last till next Thursday, targets more than 2.8 million children from one day to five years old regardless of their previous vaccines.

The campaign will be carried out through 967 fixed health centers and 2336 mobile teams in different areas.

The Health Ministry has allocated about 8800 health workers for the campaign who are distributed between the centers and the mobile teams, and it sent the vaccines to different provinces as well as allocating 354 centers for the supply of vaccines.

The Health Ministry carry out two national anti-polio vaccination campaigns annually, as the last campaign which was carried out on October 2019 achieved a coverage rate of 91 percent.

It is noteworthy that Syria has announced for the first time polio-free in 1995. But in 2013 some polio cases were registered through infections with a Pakistani origin virus which was transmitted by armed terrorist groups. Then, the Ministry of Health launched a series of national vaccination campaigns that succeeded in stopping the transmission of the virus. Thus,  no new cases were reported since the beginning of 2014 and the WHO announced at the end of 2018 that Syria was again free of polio and described this as a victory for public health at the regional and global levels.

Inas Abdulkareem