New Polio Vaccine Coming in 2010- PHCDA

The Federal Government has vowed to intensify its campaign against the polio virus in 2010 by introducing a bivalent vaccine that would help in eradicating the virus in the country.

The Executive Director, Primary Health Care Development Agency (PHCDA), Dr. Muhammad Aliyu Pate, while speaking in Abuja midweek, said the new vaccine, found to be very effective in the fight against polio in other parts of the world, would be introduced by April 2010.

Although he said the agency was keen on the prospect of introducing the new vaccine to intensify the campaign against polio, it would not rush the process so as to secure the approval of the regulatory agency before the introduction.

Pate said the vaccine had been found to be more effective in the campaign for the eradication of polio in Afghanistan and other countries, adding that the drug was ambivalent because it could be used to fight both the type ‘one’ and type ‘three’ of the virus at the same time.

“We have indicated interest to use the new bivalent vaccine. It is essentially the same vaccine but two vaccines in one.

“You know there are three types of the vaccine. There is one that is for only one virus at a time. You can tackle type ‘one’ or you tackle type ‘three’, and then there is another one that you can use to tackle all the three.

“When you give all the three, the trivalent vaccine, it is not as effective as when you give one vaccine at a time. But the bivalent vaccine has shown promise and it is working very well.

“And if we can get it into our country, it will enable us to move twice as fast in the campaign. Instead of doing one at a time, we can do a bivalent, and it can give us both 1 and 3 at the same time”, he explained.