Havana, April 22 (RHC)-- Cuba will begin today the 63rd National Bivalent Oral Antipolio Vaccination Campaign to keep this disease eliminated in the country, the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) reported on its X social network account.
The objective is to immunize all children more than a month old and under three years of age with two doses in two stages, in addition to reactivating nine-year-old infants with a portion in a second stage, actions that They will be carried out simultaneously throughout the national territory.
The first phase of the current immunization campaign against polio coincides with the 22nd Vaccination Week of the Americas and the 13th World Immunization Week under the slogans Act now to protect your future and Vaccines for a full life, respectively.
According to the Minsap, the first stage will be carried out between April 22 and 26, with a recovery week from April 29 to May 3 for sick children, among other reasons that prevented them from being vaccinated on the corresponding date within of the campaign, while the second will run from June 17 to 21 with recovery between June 24 and 28.
Poliomyelitis is an infectious-contagious disease that affects the central nervous system, which can cause inflammation of the brain and the motor neurons of the spinal cord, which produces muscle atrophy, paralysis, deformity and even death, mainly in children.
It is transmitted from one person to another orally, as the virus is carried in water or food contaminated with fecal matter from someone infected.
Cuba was the first country in the Americas to eliminate polio since 1962 and in 1995 it received the Certification of Polio Eradication by the Pan American Health Organization. Currently, the entire population under 70 years of age is protected against this highly contagious childhood disease. .
Every year, an anti-polio immunization campaign is carried out for all children aged between one month of birth and up to two years, 11 months and 29 days, and those who are nine years old and up to nine years, 11 months and 29 days, program that has allowed more than 85 million doses to be administered.
Until the triumph of the Revolution, on the island this condition was an endemic disease that left around 300 minors each year with paralysis after contracting the disease, which is estimated to have started affecting the world more than three thousand years ago.
Polio appeared in Cuba at the end of the 19th century and from 1932 to 1962, 413,000 infections and 430 deaths were recorded, the latter year in which the first national vaccination campaign was carried out. (Source: Prensa Latina)
