‘Send children for routine immunisation’
Nursing mothers who were unable to get their children immunised and administered with the Vitamin A supplements at the just-ended Child Health Promotion Week have been advised to take their children to any clinic for the routine immunisation and other health service delivery.
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“Child Health Week does not end health service delivery to children. The services are there throughout the year so you should make sure the children attend the clinics until they are five years old for all the services,” advised Dr Isabella Sagoe Moses, the National Child Health Coordinator.
She said failure to take advantage of the immunisation and the other health services they offered would put children at risk of various kinds of diseases, disabilities or death which otherwise could have been prevented.
Child Health Week is celebrated throughout the country every year to promote the health of children below five years.
As part of the week’s celebration this year, children below five years were immunised against the childhood diseases and administered with Vitamin ‘A’ supplements. Other activities included the registration of births of children under one year, weighing, provision of nutritional advise and the distribution of bed nets.
This year’s celebration, which was marked from May 9 to 13, was on the theme: ‘Good Life Start it Right’.
Dr Sagoe Moses, in an interview with the Junior Graphic, described the number of children who were brought for immunisation and administered with the other health delivery services as an improvement over last year’s.
“If more children patronise our services, it means more children are protected and so they will live healthily and child mortality levels will drop,” she stated.
She disclosed that there had been an improvement in neonatal deaths because now nursing mothers are attending post natal clinics right after giving birth, adding that they did not wait till the baby turned two or six weeks old before attending the clinics which used to be the practice earlier.
Giving reasons for the choice of the theme for this year’s celebration, she explained that for all persons to enjoy a good life they needed to start during childhood.
For instance, she said that if a child was breastfed exclusively for six months, he or she was less likely to come down with heart diseases and chronic diseases such as diabetes, stroke and asthma in adulthood.
