Mass vaccinations launched for children in typhoon-hit areas

A baby receives a measles vaccine at the Leyte Sports Centre in Tacloban yesterday.

AFP/Tacloban

A mass vaccination programme has been launched in Philippine communities that were devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan to protect children against measles and polio, UN agencies said yesterday.

The campaign began this week with 30,000 children being vaccinated in Tacloban city, one of the places hardest hit when Haiyan claimed thousands of lives nearly three weeks ago, the UN Children’s Fund Unicef and World Health Organisation said.

“The children of Tacloban need all the protection they can get right now,” Unicef emergency response coordinator Angela Kearney said in a joint statement by the agencies.

“Disease is a silent predator, but we know how to prevent it and we will do everything that we can.”

Sigrun Roesel, team leader of the WHO’s Philippine immunisation programme, said the sometimes crowded and insanitary conditions at evacuation centres were potential breeding grounds for disease. “Measles is a dangerous disease for young children, who could then catch pneumonia and die from it, especially if they are malnourished,” Roesel said.

She said the measles virus was a particular concern because it could easily be transmitted through coughing and sneezing.

Roesel said the Philippines had its last polio case in 1993.

“But Filipinos do a lot of international travelling and so there is a special effort to protect against its possible reintroduction,” she said.

The UN said the vaccination programme would aim to reach 500,000 children across the disaster zone, which covers dozens of ruined towns mainly on Leyte and Samar islands, two of the poorest in the country.

The government’s confirmed death toll from Haiyan, which brought some of the strongest winds ever recorded and tsunami-like storm surges, rose by about 250 to 5,500, with another 1,757 people missing.

The death toll has continued to climb because full assessments are yet to be made in the devastated communities.

Philippine farmers risk ‘double tragedy’ without urgent assistance: FAO

Farmers hit by Super Typhoon Haiyan face a “double tragedy” without urgent aid to clear land and irrigation channels and plant their crops, the Food and Agriculture Organisation warned yesterday.

The UN agency urged international donors to front at least $11mn (8mn euros) to help rural people in the Philippines clean farmland and de-silt irrigation canals rendered useless by this month’s typhoon.

“The urgency of timing can’t be overstated,” said Dominique Burgeon, the director of FAO’s Emergency and Rehabilitation Division.

“It would be a double tragedy if next spring farming families still needed to rely on continued humanitarian food assistance because we haven’t been able to support them as they recover from this disaster.” The Philippine Department of Agriculture has asked the FAO to support the cash-for-work scheme covering some 150,000 hectares and 80 kilometres  of communal irrigation canals, the FAO said. It takes one person 10 days to clear a single hectare of farmland, it said.

The funding will also go towards acquriring some 1,400 communal irrigation pumps.

The additional funds would come on top of $20mn already requested by the FAO to help Philippine farmers plant, fertilise, irrigate and maintain their crops to ensure the 2014 harvests. Super Typhoon Haiyan left almost 7,000 people dead or missing when it swept through the central Philippine islands early this month.