Lilongwe - The World Health Organization has called on government, partners, and donors to join forces to ensure Malawi delivers a high-quality vaccination campaign against poliovirus.
Aubrey Timoti is not willing to take chances when it comes to sanitation issues in his community after witnessing his neighbours lose two children to cholera.
In the early months of 2023, village chief Dyson Chamizi and his brother were taken ill at Nathenje Health Centre, a facility near their home some 40 kilometres from Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. Both had cholera, which is extremely virulent, but easily treatable.
In April 2019, Gilimbeta took her daughter Lusitana to a rural health facility on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi, for vaccination. At the time, she did not realize that her infant daughter was being written into history: the 5-month-old was the first child to receive the world’s first malaria vaccine (RTS,S/AS01 or RTS,S) as part of the WHO-coordinated Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme.
In late 2022 staff at Tukombo health centre, a stone’s throw away from the shores of Lake Malawi, were stretched to the limit. The small facility in northern Malawi had been repurposed to serve as a cholera treatment centre to care for hundreds of patients as cases surged amid the country’s worst outbreak.
A year since Malawi confirmed its first case of wild poliovirus type 1 in 30 years, more than 33 million children across five southern African countries have been vaccinated against the virus, with over 80 million vaccine doses administered over the past year.
Today the Government of Malawi launched the national Tithetse kolera (End Cholera) campaign to curb the outbreak affecting the country. The campaign was launched by H.E President Dr Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera in Mgona, one of the capital’s cholera hotspots.
