In India, Priti Mahara, Director, Policy Research and Advocacy, Child Rights and You said India’s immunisation programme had suffered a massive setback since March this year.
“Sadly we are trying to combat a virus which does not have a vaccine while we are unable to pay adequate attention to ailments with known vaccines in this difficult situation,” said Dr Kaninika Mitra, Health Specialist for UNICEF in West Bengal. Dr Ajay Chakrabarty, the Director of Health Services in West Bengal, admitted that measles was “a challenge.”
“Over the last few years, it’s been a hard won battle to put immunization and ANC delivery in place – it has taken effort, resources, finances as well as building community habits,” Mahara said. “But it has taken just a few months for much of the achievement to go undone.”An child receives polio drops from a health worker during a polio immunisation programme in Siliguri on January 30, 2017.
A senior Health Ministry official in Delhi said that despite problems the health centres were “kept open for a reason.” “We had a schedule of 16 hours considering that we had to attend calls after reaching home as our numbers were locally distributed,” said Anjana Basu, a health supervisor at a primary health centre in the Rajpur-Sonarpur municipality in Bengal’s 24 Parganas district, describing the chaos. ’People were calling us for ambulances and services and then even shouting at us.”
In Bihar, Raut said, the migration crisis prompted by India’s punitive national lockdown had likely meant that the children of migrant workers had probably missed their measles-rubella vaccinations. The recent floods in several of the state’s districts has further complication immunisation efforts.
Interestingly in at least two states of north east – Arunachal Pradesh and Assam – both vaccination and ANC process was claimed to be smooth.
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