Yellow fever vaccine drive starts; aid group warns of spread

“There is no known cure for yellow fever and it could go global”, Save the Children’s country director for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Heather Kerr, said in a statement.

Since the outbreak of the disease in December, the WHO’s latest estimates put the number of dead at 369 in Angola and 16 in the DRC, with almost 6,000 suspected and confirmed cases in both countries. It takes at least six months to manufacture the vaccine, so one-fifth of the standard dose will be given as a short-term solution to reach as many people as possible, according to the alert.

Save The Children, which is sending a rapid reaction unit to support vaccinations in Congo, warned the epidemic could soon spread to the Americas, Asia and Europe and other cities in Africa.

“There are 17.3 million syringes that have to be shipped or air freighted to Democratic Republic of Congo; 41,000 health workers and volunteers have been mobilized with more than 500 vehicles to operate between more than 8,000 vaccination sites in Kinshasa and along the border”, said Jasarevic.

Angola is starting a campaign this week to vaccinate 3 million people.

Yellow fever is a potentially deadly flu-like disease spread by mosquitoes.

World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic tells VOA the risk of worldwide spread also is of concern. “For the first time, World Health Organization and other partners are dealing with an outbreak of yellow fever in a dense, urban setting”.

To accomplish the emergency vaccination campaign, the health ministries in Angola and the Congo and the WHO are coordinating with 56 global partners, including Médecins sans Frontières, the International Federation of the Red Cross and UNICEF. The disease rapidly spread to 16 provinces.

Yellow fever is a viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes.

“Due to the unprecedented scale of the ongoing outbreak, the stockpile has been depleted multiple times this year”. “Since January, more than 27 million doses have been deployed from this stockpile to Angola and DRC”. Another challenge will be the vaccine itself, which is in short supply in the region. However, it has decided that it is a “serious public health event that warrants intensified national action and enhanced worldwide support”.

“The WHO Emergency Committee will reconvene in coming weeks [and] will re-evaluate the situation but we think that the outbreak is manageable if we can protect enough people with the vaccine”, he told reporters in Geneva. “The aim is to prevent a PHEIC with a strong response”.