IPV To Replace Oral Polio Vaccine

The Mozambican Health Ministry intends to introduce a new vaccine against poliomyelitis, which will be officially launched on Friday in Manhica district, 89 kilometres north of Maputo. This is the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which contains inactivated strains of all three poliovirus types. Since it is not a live vaccine, it carries no risk of vaccine-associated polio paralysis. This vaccine is given by injection, and it replaces the oral polio vaccine, which is a live vaccine and so carries the real, but extremely unlikely possibility of causing paralysis. The IPV will be given to all children aged four months.The Deputy National Director of Public Health, Quinhas Fernandes, told a Maputo press conference on Tuesday that the vaccination programme is intended to reduce the risk of any reappearance of either the wild or the vaccine-derived types of poliovirus.Like the rest of Africa, and indeed most of the world, Mozambique is currently free of polio. Indeed the only countries where polio remains endemic are Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the Ministry of Health is taking no chances, and holds regular polio vaccination campaigns to maintain a high level of immunity among the population, making it difficult for the disease to be re-introduced.“From the point of view of vaccine quality, this is better than the earlier one”, Fernandes said. “Within the polio eradication programme, it allows countries to speed things up”.The estimated cost per dose of this vaccine is 2.05 US dollars. To acquire the vaccine, the Health Ministry is spending 275.5 million meticais (about US$5.3 millions, at current exchange rates).The Ministry is also introducing a second dose of anti-measles vaccine, also on Friday in Manhiça. This too is an injectable vaccine, to be given to all children aged 18 months, in order to strengthen the first dose, which they should have received at the age of nine months.Introduction of the second dose is part of the global strategic plan to eliminate measles and rubella between 2012 and 2020.According to Fernandes, Mozambique has a national vaccination coverage higher than 80 percent, which makes it eligible for the second routine dose of the measles vaccine.The estimated cost of this vaccine is US$0.38 a dose. Over the next four years, the Health Ministry plans to invest around 131.4 million meticais in acquiring the necessary stocks of the vaccine.