Rwanda on Friday joined other nations to celebrate the World Polio Day which took place in Nyanza, a district in the south of the country where polio surveillance performance indicators were not achieved in recent years.
The celebration of World Polio Day in Rwanda was also an opportunity to sensitize health professionals, community health workers and parents on the importance of strengthening routine immunization and sustaining high performance of strong Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) surveillance.
Latest reports by the Rwanda Biomedical Center indicate that Rwanda’s 95 percent vaccination coverage rate for the most common infectious vaccine preventable diseases including polio is one of the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Latest figures from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) conducted in 2015 indicate that since 1998, the country has decreased its childhood mortality rate from 234 deaths per 1,000 live births to 42 deaths per 1,000 births in 2015, in part due to its increased vaccination rates.
Since 2016, Rwandan health officials switched from the trivalent oral polio vaccine (tOPV) to bivalent oral polio vaccine (bOPV) and introduced inactivated polio vaccine (IPV).
CU/as/APA