The World Health Organization, WHO, has disclosed plans to conduct, a week-long hybrid training for health professionals at Abuja to emphasize the importance of integrating the Oral Cholera Vaccine, OCV, as an option for emergency and prevention of cholera outbreaks in endemic countries.
The training, intended for individuals that will be involved in the planning and implementation of OCV campaigns, is aimed at ‘Ending Cholera: A Global Road Map to 2030.
The road map launched in 2017 targets to reduce cholera deaths by ninety per cent by the year 2030 and eliminate cholera in at least twenty out of the forty-seven countries currently affected.
The WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said the increasing use of Oral Cholera Vaccines to complement other interventions including water, sanitation and hygiene, for prevention and control of cholera outbreaks, is an additional achievement in humanity’s walk toward vaccine equity and universal health coverage.
She highlighted some challenges to include the 2021 annual Global Task Force on Cholera Control, GTFCC, stakeholder meeting, where poor quality reactive and preventive OCV campaign request, lack of OCV use in outbreak response in some settings, and inadequate monitoring and evaluation of OCV campaigns.
The workshop is designed to address the associated lack of human resources knowledgeable about OCV by building awareness and practical skills on developing an emergency and preventive OCV campaign request, including how to identify areas in an active outbreak to target OCV as a control intervention and how to identify hotspots to prevent cholera outbreaks as part of a multi-year OCV plan, targets Anglophone Cholera Priority countries.
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