The Polio Campaign

A few weeks ago marked the beginning of the second tour of the Polio Campaign. The goal of the campaign is to vaccinate every child (0-5 years old) against polio. And here’s the catch: you only have 4 days to do it. Sounds tough right? Actually, it’s not.

Here’s what we did: We made 5 teams of two people (each team made up of a nurse and a community health agent), gave each team a section of the village, a ton of vaccines, a sheet to check off how many dosages they’ve given, a marker, and a piece of chalk. And off they went.

Polio vaccines are actually incredibly easy to give: you just give two drops in the mouth of whatever child you’re trying to vaccinate and then you move on: since it’s a quick process, you need to have a lot of them when you leave in the morning (especially cause if the teams run out of vaccines, it’s one of my jobs to go bring them extras).

They bring the sheets with them to check off how many dosages they’ve given because at the end of the day we use that to figure out how many children we’ve vaccinated, how many we have left, and how much vaccine is “lost” along the way. Pretty easy to use system, which is great because being able to read and write is not a luxury that everyone here has. Also, at every house they stop off at the health agents note the number of children in the household and number of children vaccinated that way they know whether to come back to the house later. And, every child vaccinated gets the left pinky nail colored in with a marker (our village uses purple) so we can see whether the child has been vaccinated or not. Apparently, some parents will say my child has been vaccinated when they haven’t and some will say they haven’t been vaccinated when they have. It would be easier if everyone told the truth- but that’s the way of the world I guess.

In order to prepare for the campaign we did a lot of prep work. First we went out and spoke to all of the important people in the village, and informed them of what we were doing. Then, we divided our nurses and community health agents into teams, and then assigned each team an area for each day. This took into account: homes, churches, mosques, the market, the bus station, etc. Then, we told the town crier to go out and publicize the fact that we were doing vaccinations so that everyone would be “in the know”. The day before the campaign started we met with all the teams together, explained what they were doing, explained how to check and make sure the vaccines were okay to use. Then we said the French equivalent of “Have at it.” And, off they went.

The next few days were pretty interesting to say the least. Between people saying, “aw man this is really difficult” to people saying “aw man this isn’t easy” there was a lot of well, you only have 3 days left (or two days, or one day, etc). Then there were the random surveys. This meant that the major and I went out and just talked to people and asked whether their children had received the vaccination, how many kids they have, how they heard about the vaccination, and most importantly- what we were vaccinating against. The last one was potentially the most important question because this led to other questions such as, “why are you letting someone vaccinate your child but you didn’t ask what medication they were giving or what it would prevent against?”

By the end of the four days we had gotten to 99.54% participation rate which was good though not the 100% we had asked for.

Tuesday (the day after the last day of the vaccination campaign) a couple of moms brought their kids in to the health center asking for the polio vaccination- they had heard that it was going on but they were out of town and for some reason didn’t get the vaccination wherever they went. So, we vaccinated them and reached our slightly over 100% quota (the reason we had over 100% is that we vaccinated people from other villages who were either at our market or were passing through on a bus).

All’s well that ends well.