Officials and healthcare professionals during the vaccination campaign.
As the national immunisation campaign against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) enters into third week, over 70,000 children have been vaccinated. The campaign has, by now, covered a total of 131 schools including 101 government and independent schools, and 30 private schools.
The one-month campaign by Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), which began on October 17 runs until November 14. The campaign will cover some 294,000 children between one to 13 years of age. The vaccines will be administered to school going students in their schools and for the others at healthcare facilities, including some 20 private clinics, for free.
Dr Mohamed bin Hamad Al Thani, the director of Public Health, MoPH, who visited one of the private schools recently, expressed his satisfaction with the good progress of the campaign. He praised the commitment of the medical teams in ensuring the highest standards in vaccine administration. This has had great impact on the fact that no significant adverse events have been recorded even with the high number of children being vaccinated daily.
Communicable Disease Center (CDC), USA, has been providing technical support to MoPH through their experts who have come here for the campaign.
The campaign comes amid 22 recently reported cases of measles in Qatar. Though according to Qatar’s vaccination schedules, children should be given two MMR shots at 12 and 18 months of age, a few of the children do not develop sufficient immunity against the diseases after the first or the second dose. Hence the third MMR booster dose is important, according to MoPH officials.
