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Inter Agency Working Group on CIMCI

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Immunization Plus

Immunization services and control of vaccine preventable diseases

State of the World's Vaccines and Immunization

Children gather as a health worker, wearing a T-shirt bearing the UNICEF logo, uses a megaphone to announce the beginning of a two-day immunization session for all 5,000 people at the Wenela camp who have been displaced by the flooding, in the district of Chibuto, in the province of Gaza.

During the session, both children and adults will be vaccinated, as needed, against measles, tetanus and meningitis, and children will receive vitamin A capsules to boost their natural immune systems.
By mid-March 2000 in Mozambique, relief and rehabilitation efforts were well under way in response to the worst flooding in 50 years that followed torrential rains in late February, affecting at least seven provinces, causing some 500 deaths and leaving more than 300,000 people homeless or without a livelihood.

UNICEF is working with the Government, NGOs, other UN agencies and foreign governments to respond to the emergency and has also supported a Ministry of Health mass vaccination campaign targeting tens of thousands of children and adults in three provinces in the Limpopo River valley, one of the most severely affected areas. Providing vaccinations against measles, meningitis and tetanus, as well as vitamin A capsules (to reinforce immune systems) for an estimated 45,000 children, the two-week campaign demonstrated the logistical challenges faced to vaccinate people in remote areas.

A health worker gives a tetanus toxoid vaccination to Sheima Salman, 17 and pregnant with her third child, at Al-Zahra'a Primary Health Care Centre in the Kadhumiyali section of Baghdad, the capital. UNICEF supplies oral rehydration salts (ORS), drugs and equipment to the centre.
Despite the country's economic problems, large families are still common in Iraq.

A survey jointly carried out by UNICEF and the Government of Iraq in the first half of 1999 shows that in the southern and central regions of the country under-five mortality rates have more than doubled in the last ten years, from 56 to 131 deaths per 1,000 live births between the periods 1984-1989 and 1994-1999, respectively. Infant mortality rates likewise increased from 47 to 108 deaths per 1,000 live births in the same time- frames. Today the risk of dying before five years of age is greatest for children whose mother has no formal education or who live in rural areas.

Boys are also at slightly higher risk than girls. In the autonomous northern regions of the country, average infant and under-five mortality rates have declined during the same period, following a brief rise between 1989-1994. However, boys and rural children are also more at risk in the north.
In response to the dramatic situation in southern and central Iraq, UNICEF is recommending specific measures, including a return to the promotion of exclusive breastfeeding for the first months of a child's life; expedited implementation of nutrition programmes; priority approval by the Government and the UN Sanctions Committee of contracts for supplies benefiting children; and increased funding for humanitarian efforts in Iraq by the international community. UNICEF continues to work in partnership with the Government and local authorities in Iraq in health, hygiene and education and in programmes for children and women at special risk, including those displaced or otherwise affected by the cumulative effects of past wars and the sanctions.