State achieved only 53 per cent of its routine immunisation target for children in the month of April owing to Covid-19, officials from the health department said on Tuesday, adding that the civil surgeons of all the Jharkhand districts have been directed to conduct catch-up rounds of immunisation for infants in the rural areas.
“We could achieve only 53 per cent of our target in April as the focus shifted to Covid vaccination and precautionary measures to prevent spread of novel coronavirus,” said the nodal officer of health department’s Information, Education and Communication (IEC) wing, Dr. Siddharth Tripathi. “All the districts have been directed to conduct catch-up immunisation of the children who could not get vaccinated in April at the earliest,” he added.
District level officials have been asked to identify the left out and drop out children and vaccinate them. Left out children are those who did not receive any dose of vaccine since birth, while drop out children are those who got a couple of vaccine doses but did not complete their course of immunisation, officials said.
The catch-up rounds for immunising those children who could not get their routine vaccine doses in the month of April will be run at the Panchayat and block levels by Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), health officials said. However, they clarified that the routine immunisation will run along with vaccination campaigns against Covid-19 across the state and won’t have any effect on the latter.
Routine immunisation plays an important role in preventing cases of measles, influenza, Japanese Encephalitis, Polio, Tuberculosis, Diphtheria, Hepatitis and Rotavirus among children. As per data with the health department, around 8.5 lakh babies are born every year in Jharkhand and their immunisation process begins at the age of 1.5 months.
As per the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), at least 30 of 1000 infants die in rural Jharkhand. Around 165 mothers die per 1 lakh deliveries in the state every year, highlights NFHS.
The government also launched a vaccination campaign against pneumonia this month in Jharkhand. Under the campaign, around 77,000 infants are scheduled to get doses of Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine (PCV) by the end of June.
NHM officials claimed that Covid-19 vaccine wastage in Jharkhand dropped to 1.7 per cent on Tuesday. Data shared by NHM highlighted that a total of 58,17,250 vaccine doses were made available to the State from the Centre so far, and around 100844 doses have been wasted since the launch of the immunisation programme against Covid-19 on January 16.