Emergency campaign against yellow fever in Liberia

(Monrovia: 24 February 2004), Liberia

• International health agencies announced Tuesday that they were joining forces with the Liberian government to combat a yellow fever emergency in this bruised and battered land.
  UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), and several medical NGOs said they were launching an emergency mass immunization campaign together with Liberia's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.

"The first immunization teams should be in the field within two days - by Thursday, 26 February," said Dr. Luzitu Simao, of the WHO.

"WHO considers just one laboratory confirmed case to be an outbreak and we already have three confirmed cases with another 11 suspected cases undergoing laboratory analysis at the Pasteur Institute in Abidjan," Dr. Simao added.

"Conditions are ripe here for an epidemic," he said. "The last 14 years of civil war have literally destroyed Liberia's health infrastructure and yellow fever is an extremely deadly disease. Even among hospitalized patients, the mortality rate may reach up to 50%.

The patients with the three confirmed cases and the two suspected cases have died.

UNICEF officials said fewer than 80,000 vaccination doses were currently available in Liberia. They estimated that 722,000 people above six months of age were in need of urgent vaccination.

UNICEF and WHO estimate that it will cost $1.3 million to control the outbreak. The funds will cover vaccines, injection materials, operational costs and the strengthening of epidemiological surveillance and public awareness.

Liberia lies in the yellow fever belt of West Africa and at least six outbreaks of the disease were reported between 1995 and 2002.

Yellow fever is a viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by mosquitoes, either from monkey to human, or human-to-human.

The civil war sparked massive movements of people from rural areas, where yellow fever is endemic, to crowded urban areas creating ideal conditions for transmission of the disease. Some 500,000 people are internally displaced, living in squalid camps or in the ruins of abandoned buildings, with horrendously poor sanitation.

Environmental conditions will become even more favourable for the disease with the onset of the rainy season in April.

The vaccination campaign will first target Bong and Nimba counties, which border Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire respectively.

For queries, please contact: UNICEF- Angela Kearney, akearney@unicef.org phone +377 47 532425;
WHO - Luzitu Simao, simao.wholr@undp.org phone +377 47 549071