YAOUNDE, Dec 12 (NNN-ALLAFRICA) — Members of measles vaccination teams in southern Cameroon have been attacked and beaten by locals who say the serums triggered side effects that sent 12 children to local hospitals.
Many rural Cameroonians distrust vaccination campaigns, which have been organized as part of a national initiative to stop a measles outbreak that has afflicted a number of children.
Thirty-four-year-old Samuel Amougou, a vaccination team member in Cameroon’s southern commercial town of Ebolowa, is still recovering from wounds he sustained from angry parents who oppose the vaccination campaign.
He says Roman Catholic clergy transported him and five other vaccination team members to Ebolowa regional hospital after angry parents harassed them last Friday in front of a local government school.
At the same hospital, Etala Suza, a 35-year-old trader and father of two, says his son also suffered side effects of the vaccine and has been hospitalized for several days.
Suza said after his son came home from school feeling tired, running a fever and vomiting, he, Suza, was told about the vaccination campaign for children in all schools. Suza said he was told by the child’s driver that the youngster threw up several times in the car.
Cameroon organized the national vaccination campaign last week to contain the current measles outbreak it said had infected more than 3,000 people, especially children. The health ministry reported that the most affected area was in the central African state’s northern border with Nigeria and Chad, where 17 children had died this month.
The government said but for the south region where the towns of Ebolowa and Sangmelima are located, the vaccination campaign went well in the country’s nine other administrative regions.
Cameroon’s health ministry reports that progress has been made in persuading parents to have their children vaccinated. Vaccination coverage in towns is estimated at 80 percent, but in some villages in the country’s hinterlands, barely have three out of every 10 children are vaccinated.
The last vaccination campaign, between Dec. 4 and Dec. 8, targeted 3.3 million children between the ages of nine months and five years of age. — NNN-ALLAFRICA
