​With Pharmacy Month in September focusing on vaccinations, the City of Cape Town urges parents and caregivers to ensure that their children’s vaccinations are up to date, especially considering two outbreaks of disease this year. 

Children get 16 vaccinations between birth and the age of 12. Of these, 14 are administered in the first 18 months of their lives. Immunisation of children helps to prevent death and reduces suffering from childhood diseases like measles, polio, diphtheria and tuberculosis.

While 2017 has been characterised by outbreaks of measles and diphtheria, the incidence of these diseases has been greatly reduced because of the immunisation programme. The result is that there have been only sporadic cases reported in the last decade.

The recent outbreaks are, however, a stark reminder of the importance of ensuring that we achieve full immunisation coverage of children under one year and that by six years and 12 years school-going children receive their booster doses. Environmental health practitioners and nurses rallied to contain the outbreaks. They worked through weekends to visit the affected communities and identify contacts at homes, schools and crèches. We salute their commitment to the cause and generosity with their time.

The reality in Cape Town is that our immunisation coverage has been dropping slowly over the last few years and the number of children that are susceptible to childhood diseases has increased from one year to the next.

The immunisation programme is a victim of its own success in some ways in that it has virtually erased diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus and diphtheria – to the point where newer generations are not even aware of the existence of these diseases. But when an older child that was otherwise well succumbs to such a disease and the adults around them are affected too, it is a wake-up call.

Communicable diseases can spread like wildfire when a large number of children are not adequately covered by the full immunisation schedule. Epidemics have the potential to kill more people than crime and violence. One of the transformational priorities of the City’s Organisational Development and Transformation Plan is to focus on creating safe communities, and this means a city where parents and civil society join hands with healthcare workers to ensure that children complete the immunisation schedule and where Early Childhood Development centres and schools ask for a child’s Road-to-Health booklet or a letter to state that their leaners are fully covered.

Immunisation is the most precious gift that a healthcare worker can give a child and we salute the pharmacy sector for having taken the lead in identifying this important theme: ‘Don’t wait – vaccinate’.

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