Vaccination

Eleven suspected cases of measles are been treated in the Ndebala village in Eastern Cape, the department of health said on Saturday.

The Department of Health has introduced a new anti-tetanus vaccine for children, it was announced on Friday. The department's Fidel Hadebe said the vaccine was introduced to clinics and hospitals as of 1 February 2008 . Diftavax Td is to be administered to children at the age of six and 12 years.

New vaccines have sharply reduced the number of children paralyzed by polio and raised hopes that a 5 billion campaign to wipe it out may be close to success, a top public health official said in an interview.

Four children in the southern African country of Angola have been infected with polio, but the number of cases around the world has been cut in half so far this year, the U.N. health agency said Friday.

Pharmacists have been receiving a number of queries about the current outbreak of wild poliovirus 1 in Namibia. Please remember that for more information you are welcome to phone the Amayeza Drug Information Centre on (011) 678-2332.

Namibia's first oubreak of polio in more than a decade has killed 15 and the number of cases has risen sharply to 96, the health minister said Tuesday on the eve of a mass vaccination campaign.

In what officials called a major public health breakthrough, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved the first vaccine developed to protect women against cervical cancer.

UK researchers have identified a number of factors that predict when an infant is unlikely to receive all recommended immunizations, according to a report in the British Medical Journal for June 3.

BAREILLY, India The cry went up the moment the polio vaccination team was spotted Hide your children!Some families slammed doors on the two volunteers going house to house with polio drops in this teeming city's decrepit maze of lanes, saying that they feared the vaccine would sicken or sterilize their children, or simply that they were fed up with the long drive to eradicate polio. We have a lot of other problems, and you don't care about those, shouted one woman from behind a locked door. All you have is drops. My children get other diseases, and we don't get help.

This flu season there's additional reason to make your little ones wash their hands and keep their noses off their sleeves. A new study in the American Journal of Epidemiology suggests that 3- and 4-year-olds drive flu epidemics -- and that flu symptoms in kids under 5, more than any other age group, are correlated with flu-related deaths in the general population.