A National census on domestic pets is to be incorporated into this year's National Immunization Day (NID) exercise. The national house-to- house polio vaccination; de-worming and Vitamin A upplementation exercise, which takes off from November 12 to 14, 2009, will also see the collection of data on the number of dogs and cats in every household across the country.�
The exercise, according to the Minister of Health-designate, Dr Benjamin Kunbuor, is aimed at providing data for the Veterinary Service to make adequate provision for a mass immunization of dogs that was being planned for next year.
Dr Kunbuor, who made this known at the media launch of this year's integrated Maternal and Child Health Campaign in Accra, said, "The health of household pets cannot be separated from the health of the people they live with," adding that if the health of both animals and human beings was in harmony, then good health could be sustained over time.
The immunization exercise, which will be on the theme, "Healthier mothers and children make a better Ghana", will cover children from birth to five years, as well as breast-feeding mothers who are within eight weeks of delivery as of the time of the exercise.
The acting Director of the Ghana Veterinary Service, Dr Enoch Koney, who lauded the collaboration between the immunization exercise and the domestic pet survey, said it had been established that 75 per cent of emerging and re-emerging diseases were of animal origin. He mentioned diseases such as rabies and bird and swine flu as some of the notable diseases that had been transmitted from animal to man for some decades now.
The National Child Health Co-ordinator, Dr Isabella Sagoe-Moses, in a presentation, said one of the challenges facing her outfit was the fact that major causes of illness or death in children and women were preventable, saying that interventions were available but they were unable to reach the target population through routine services.
The Deputy Country Representative of UNICEF, Mr Rene Van Dongen, called for a scaled-up effort by which women and children in densely populated urban centres could be reached for immunization.
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