CAMPALA, Uganda – Uganda has launched a national yellow fever vaccination campaign to help protect its population against the mosquito-borne disease that has long posed a threat.
By the end of April, Ugandan authorities had vaccinated 12.2 million of the targeted 14 million people, said Dr. Michael Baganizi, the official responsible for immunization at the Ministry of Health.
Uganda will now require everyone traveling to and from the country to have a yellow fever vaccination card, as an international health regulation, Baganizi said.
Ugandan authorities hope the requirement will compel more people to get the yellow fever vaccine, amid a general atmosphere of vaccine hesitancy that worries health care providers in the East African country.
The single-dose vaccine was offered free of charge to Ugandans aged between 1 and 60 years. Vaccination centers in the capital, Kampala, and elsewhere included schools, universities, hospitals and local government units.
Before that, Ugandans used to pay to get the yellow fever vaccine at private clinics for the equivalent of $27.
Uganda, with 45 million inhabitants, is one of 27 countries on the African continent classified as high risk for yellow fever outbreaks. According to the World Health Organization, there are about 200,000 cases and 30,000 deaths worldwide each year due to the disease.
The most recent outbreak in Uganda was recorded earlier this year in the central districts of Buikwe and Buvuma.
Yellow fever is caused by a virus transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes. Most infections are asymptomatic. Symptoms may include fever, muscle pain, headache, loss of appetite and nausea or vomiting, according to the WHO.
Uganda’s vaccination drive is part of a global strategy launched in 2017 by the WHO and partners such as the United Nations Children’s Agency to eliminate yellow fever by 2026. The aim is to protect nearly a billion people in Africa and the Americas. .
An interim evaluation of this strategy, the results of which were published last year, concluded that 185 million people in high-risk African countries had been vaccinated by August 2022.
In Uganda, most people get the yellow fever vaccine when traveling to countries like South Africa, which require proof of vaccination upon arrival.
James Odite, a nurse who works at a private hospital designated as a vaccination center in a suburb of the capital, Kampala, told the AP that hundreds of doses remained unused after the end of the yellow fever vaccination campaign. They will be used in a future mass campaign.
Among the questions raised by vaccine-hesitant people was whether “the government wants to give them expired vaccines,” Odite said.
Baganizi, the person in charge of immunization, said the Ugandan government has invested in community “awareness” sessions during which authorities tell people that vaccines save lives.
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