Staff Reporter A mop-up campaign is being planned in Sindhto immunize children between the age of 9 months and 15 years missed during the previous typhoid conjugate vaccination (TCV) drive. The exercise scheduled for March this year will be consequent to province wide exercise, conducted in November 2018, during which over 10 million children were aimed to be covered, over a three-week period. A team of researchers, headed by Farah Qamar, an associate professor in paediatrics and child health at Aga Khan University (AKU) sharing details of the scheme said parents, whose children did not receive the vaccine, are keen to participate in the forthcoming immunization campaign. The willingness on part of parents to get their children immunized was said to be reflective of their satisfaction about efficacy of the typhoid conjugate vaccine. “Emergency vaccination campaign in the province found the typhoid conjugate vaccine to be effective in preventing new cases of the disease,” said the pediatrician heading a team researchers to assess efficacy of TCV in local environment. Over 10,000 cases of extensively drug resistant (XDR) typhoid, a strain of the disease resistant to an unprecedented range of antibiotics have been reported since 2016 in Karachi and Hyderabad. Dr. Farah Qamar reminded that this outbreak led to the launch of an emergency vaccination campaign in January 2018 in the worst affected areas of Hyderabad which saw 207,000 children between 6 months and 10 years of age receive the new vaccine. At the same time as the campaign, the team of researchers also set up a surveillance system in the same area over an 18-month period to screen a cohort of over 20,000 children, who received the vaccine, to detect cases of typhoid. It was found that 9 out of 10 children in the cohort, or 89 per cent, did not contract the disease, said the child health specialist mentioning that level of the vaccine’s effectiveness were also in line with a study in Nepal. Reiterating that the exercise strengthens the case for the national roll out of the vaccine, Dr Qamar also shared details of how lessons from the Hyderabad campaign had been applied in Lyari (Karachi) and later during Sindh-wide campaign.
