The Ministry of Health this week commenced the Oral Polio Vaccination campaign targeting all children aged seven years and below across the country.
The campaign comes about as a public health response to the detection of the circulating Vaccine Derived Poliovirus Type 2 (cVDPV2) through environmental surveillance as previously reported.
The first round of the campaign started on February 23 and it is expected to end on February 26 while the second round will later start on March 30 and will be completed on April 2nd.
The campaign will be conducted house to house across all districts in Botswana and it will also cover schools, churches and other places where the target population is likely to be found during the campaign.
Officiating the campaign, Minister of Health Edwin Dikoloti, relayed that the campaign is meant to save the lives of children from a threatening public health emergency and urged Batswana to cooperate, adding that vaccination teams were given identification to present when they reach out to the community.
“Botswana is fully committed to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. It is for this reason that for some years now, there have been no polio cases or traces of the polio virus in Botswana,” he pointed out.
The Minister said that a circulating Vaccine Derived Poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) was detected in Botswana on October 27th, 2022 from an environmental sample collected from a Wastewater Treatment Plant in Gaborone.
“The virus was immediately linked to a strain currently circulating in Central Africa. Another circulating Vaccine Derived Poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) was isolated in a waste water treatment plant in Francistown,” he said.
Furthermore, he highlighted that field investigations in the catchment areas of the environmental sites where the virus was detected were conducted and a joint formal risk assessment of the situation in the country was conducted by the ministry and its partners.
Following the assessment, Dikoloti said they established an urgent need to vaccinate all children aged seven years and below, with the oral novel polio type 2 vaccine (nOPV2).
United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Representative, Joan Matji congratulated the Ministry of Health and its partners for taking a swift action once the circulating vaccine derived polio was detected in routine environmental surveillance.
“This is a true indication of a nation that is caring and is decisive when it comes to positive child health outcomes,” she emphasized.
