A five-day Malaria vaccination prevention programme has been launched in the Central River Region courtesy of the Malaria Control Programme which is targeting at least 39,468 children between the ages of 3 to 59 months.

Sulfadoxine pyrimethamine – SPAQ-CD vaccine pills will take a routine period of 28 days in a four month period.

The Malaria disease is among the health burden in The Gambia and with cases of the illnesses soaring up last year following a period of drop in numbers, according to health officials.

Baba Galleh Jallow, the Health Regional Director for CRR, said: “We are at least targeting 39, 468 kids and we are covering both CRR North and CRR South with about 669 villages.

“Central River Region and Upper River Region are hotspots for malaria especially for children under 5 years; we want to make sure that kids are protected very well.”

Mr. Jallow welcomed the campaign since its started four years ago saying that the vaccine prevention had greatly reduced malaria prevalence in his region.

“Since we started this programme four years ago, we have seen a remarkable improvement in the prevention of malaria as far as the under 5-year-old kids are concern, and as we speak we are less than 1 percent prevalence in this region.”

But he correlated the challenges faced by them during the giving out of the vaccines to communities in his region such as lack of mobility and good road networks to reach various vulnerable communities.

The village of Kerr Ousman Boye was the first port of call for the team giving out the malaria vaccines – about a kilometer to the southern region of Senegal where almost the villagers are farmers.

And Gibel Boye, the Village Health Worker, said: “we have seen the impact of the vaccines since we began benefitting from them.”

He said the malaria prevalence has drastically reduced due to the chemoprevention vaccine.

Yama Sarr is one of the children to benefit from the vaccine and her grandmother, Kaddy Sallah, and Ebrima Baldeh, father of two other kids who were vaccinated at Sarre Futaboth, expressed their delight about the vaccines that had protected their kids from being infected with malaria.

Reporting by Adama Makasuba