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Health ministry downplays meningitis threat
2008-03-22 10:02:09
By Hannah Mwandoloma
The government has no plans to carry out routine vaccination for meningitis, a deadly disease that affects mostly elderly people.
In an interview with The Guardian, Health and Social Welfare deputy minister Aisha Kigoda said the government had no plan to make a routine vaccination for the `Hib` form of meningitis.
The minister`s comments came after she was asked to state the government`s position on the drive to fight the disease as other countries were doing.
Uganda, for instance, had managed to combat the disease through routine vaccination.
``We have no serious cases of this disease. So the government has no plans to widen the scope of a campaign against the disease,`` said Dr Kigoda.
She said vaccination against Hib meningitis was only provided immediately when there was an outbreak of the epidemic.
``The disease in Tanzania mostly affects adults, but there are isolated cases of children under the age of five and we discover them when they go to hospital for treatment of a different disease such as malaria,`` said Kigoda.
Kigoda said there were several diseases that the Ministry of Health had decided to provide vaccination for including tuberculosis (TB), polio and measles.
Tanzania\'s experience seems to differ from neighbouring countries like Uganda where widespread vaccination against the disease resulted in total elimination of the disease in children under the age five.
According to a recent study by Global Health Strategies, Hib meningitis has been virtually eliminated in young children in Uganda just five years after the country introduced Haemophilus influenzae Type B (Hib) vaccine nationwide.
A clinical communication specialist for GHS, David Ngilangwa, said upon monitoring the occurrence of bacterial meningitis due to Hib between 2001 and 2006, researchers saw a marked decline in the disease resulting from the implementation of a new vaccination programme.
``If our neighbours have succeeded in this I`m sure our government can take action and introduce this vaccine in the country. This way we are going to save a big number of children,`` said Ngilangwa.
Executive secretary of GAVI Alliance, Dr Julian Lob-Levyt, applauded this as a true success in controlling the disease that has too often claimed so many lives.
``Today, 83 per cent of the GAVI-eligible countries in Africa have now included, or will soon include, Hib vaccine in their national immunisation programmes,`` said Rana Hajjeh, director of the Hib Initiative in the statement issued recently.
Dr Sam Zaramba, director general of the Uganda Ministry of Health said that the results of the study were encouraging, adding that such interventions made a significant contribution to achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing mortality in children less than 5 years of age.
Haemophilus influenzae Type B is a leading cause of pneumonia and meningitis, an inflammation of the lining covering the brain and spinal cord. E
ach year, Hib kills approximately 400,000 children under the age of five, most of them in the developing world.
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