Iraqi children vaccinated for polio
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.N. Children's Fund and Iraqi health teams began a five-day campaign Sunday to vaccinate 4 million Iraqi children against polio.
Thousands of health workers and volunteers fanned out across the country, going door-to-door to give all children under the age of 5 the two drops that will protect them against the crippling disease.
Carel de Rooy, UNICEF's representative in Iraq, said the campaign is routine and has nothing to do with a possible war.
"This was planned months ago. Every year we do this," he said after visiting a dispensary. "What we are doing here over the next five days is just to maintain a polio-free Iraq."
UNICEF has been working for six years to rid Iraq of polio, helping train 14,000 volunteers and contributing $500,000 to the effort, most of it donated by the European Union.
UNICEF also supports a program to speed up vaccinations against measles, which kills more children than any other disease in this Arab country, and is trying to improve nutrition for Iraqi children, a quarter of whom are malnourished.
A week before the campaign began, the Health Ministry began an advertising campaign on radio and television, and mosques' loudspeakers urged people to take their children for vaccination.
In Baghdad's Saddam City neighborhood -- a sprawling slum that is home to half of the city's 4 million people -- parents brought their children to the al-Kayyara dispensary to get the drops.
Forty teams knocked on doors across the neighborhood to vaccinate children in their homes. After each vaccination, the workers marked the front of the house with chalk giving the date of vaccination.
De Rooy said the last polio case in Iraq was reported in 1999.
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