Life
Haiti: Millions of children to receive life-saving vaccines
A health worker administers a polio vaccine to a child. PHOTO/Faisal Mahmood/Reuters
Haiti launched a countrywide vaccination campaign to immunize millions of children against childhood killers.
More children die in Haiti before reaching their fifth birthdays than anywhere else in the Americas. And more Haitian children lack all of their shots than in most countries.
Seeking to change these grim statistics, Haiti is ramping up vaccinations against measles, rubella, and polio as part of an intensive countrywide immunization campaign that kicks off Saturday. The launch coincides with the World Health Organization’s Immunization Week, a global effort to underscore the importance of immunizations.
“Our mission is to save lives and particularly to save the lives of our children,” said Dr. Florence Duperval Guillaume, Haiti’s health minister. “Children today will be the adults of tomorrow, and they will be the ones entrusted with the future of the country.”
With less than 60 percent of Haiti’s tiniest citizens completely immunized, Guillaume has set an ambitious goal. She wants to raise the number to at least 90 percent, especially for children under 5, against measles and polio. Haiti has been declared polio free since 2001, she said, but to get accredited the country needs to hit the 90 percent mark; not an easy task in a poverty-stricken nation where culturally parents don’t always see the benefits of taking children to a doctor unless they are sick and most of the population lack access to basic health services.
