Kwara State bolsters strategy to curb Yellow fever scourge

Akwai zafi? meaning does it hurt (in Hausa language), asks Abdulafar Ahmed, jokingly as he administered the Yellow fever vaccine to some of the children at Ruggar Budo (a nomadic) settlement in Gwaria ward of Kaiama Local Government Area (LGA), in Kwara State Nigeria.  Mr Ahmed is one of the vaccinators administering the yellow fever vaccines and other life-saving routine immunization (RI) vaccines to children under one at the nomadic settlements in Kaiama LGA.

Kaiama LGA hosts many nomadic settlements and is a  hard-to-reach and security-compromised area in Kwara state. Getting to the settlements requires health workers to travel on bad roads, canoes and bikes.  Mr Ahmed says, “the Yellow fever outreach is a reactive response to the suspected and confirmed case of yellow fever in the locality. 

“Recently, a confirmed case of Yellow fever was reported in a six-year-old girl,  Khadijah Issah, from Ruggar Budo. This spurred the intervention and the team leveraged the exercise to administer other RI immunization to the children, especially those who had missed out on their immunization schedule. 

Children between 9-12 months received the Yellow fever vaccine, while children under one were given other vitals. In total, 81 children received life-saving vaccines. The Yellow fever vaccine will avert the transmission of the disease among the people in the community and state at large,” he says.  

Curbing transmission 
To curb the spread of the Yellow fever…