Sana’a: Yemen has announced plans to vaccinate the one million children born in the country each year against the most severe form of diarrhoea, rotavirus.
Rotavirus is often fatal for under-fives. The vaccination campaign is supported by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (Gavi).
Yemen has one of the highest rates of under-five mortality in the world, at 77 deaths for every 1,000 live births. This compares with an average of 41 deaths for every 1,000 live births for the whole of the Middle East and north Africa. Yemen is also the poorest country in the Arabian peninsula. More than 46 per cent of the population live below the poverty line, on less than $2 (Dh7.34) a day.
However, Yemen’s immunisation coverage rate for DTP3 — three doses of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines given to children below the age of one, the standard measure of immunisation — reached 81 per cent in 2011, according to the latest data released by the World Health Organisation. Globally, the coverage rate is 82 per cent.
International organisations and charities are calling for support to Yemen, where as many as one million children suffer from chronic malnutrition.
With 58 per cent of children under the age of five stunted by malnutrition, Yemen has the second highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world, behind Afghanistan.
Acute malnutrition affects as many as 30 per cent of children in some parts of the country, close to the levels in south Somalia, and twice as high as the internationally recognised emergency threshold.
Unicef, the UN agency for children, attributes the dire humanitarian situation to chronic underdevelopment, exacerbated by years of conflict.
