Millions Risk Yellow Fever Scourge

Scientists under the auspices of the Nigerian Academy of Science (NAS) have raised the alarm over a large number of Nigerian population that is at risk of contacting Yellow Fever disease, saying the country would need over 101 million doses of vaccines to tackle the problem.
President of NAS, Oyewale Tomori, who said this in Lagos on Thursday, also confirmed that the global shortage of the Yellow Fever vaccines had made it compelling for the Federal Government to do something urgently about protecting the vulnerable population the bulk of which include children and pregnant mothers. “A total of 101,298,992 million Nigerians are currently estimated to be at risk of Yellow Fever,” he said.

The NAS alert is coming on the heels of two outbreaks of the wild polio virus in Borno State, two years after the last report of polio outbreak in the country. ‘Yellow Fever’ is caused by a flavivirus.

It is transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes; and is usually, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which had become infected by biting an infected human or animal (a monkey).

Yellow fever virus is found in tropical and subtropical areas in South America and Africa. According to Tomori, the figure of the vulnerable group was got from previous studies conducted in communities that experienced outbreaks in the past.

“There were over 377 local government areas in Nigeria that are presently at risk of Yellow Fever in the country,” he said. Although ad hoc vaccinations took place during previous outbreak of Yellow Fever in the country, Tomori said: “There has not been a mass immunisation to prevent further outbreaks in the vulnerable population.”

He said the Yellow Fever outbreaks was currently rocking Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo with an estimated 953 cases reported in those two countries.
Yellow Fever vaccines that are available all over the world are being mopped up and deployed to the affected areas so as to prevent further outbreaks in those regions. Besides, the global community is already experiencing the spread of Yello fever to China, Kenya, among others. Tomore reasoned that vaccinating the balance of the Nigerian population is our business.
He, however, said Nigeria does not have to wait until there was an epidemic before moving in to vaccinate the huge number of its population that were at risk. “Having a single dose of the vaccine, he said would provide enough immunity for a lifetime,” he stated.
When all these came to light in the past, president of NAS said the country should have started vaccinating those at risk in 2012, but did not do so. “Nigeria is the only country in west Africa that have not done the mass vaccination of its vulnerable population,” he said.
According to him, many west African countries including Togo, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, others have all done a mass immunisation of their at risk population He called for a quick Federal Government intervention to prevent the vaccination being late, saying we do not have to wait for an epidemic to break before taking the initiative to do mass vaccination.