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Jakarta Post

City plans free mass immunization drive

Following an alarming rise in diphtheria cases across the country, the Jakarta administration plans to hold a mass vaccination program that will not only cover children, but also adults in the hope of breaking the chain of infections prior to the upcoming Asian Games

Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, January 4, 2018

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City plans free mass immunization drive

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ollowing an alarming rise in diphtheria cases across the country, the Jakarta administration plans to hold a mass vaccination program that will not only cover children, but also adults in the hope of breaking the chain of infections prior to the upcoming Asian Games.

The capital, together with Banten and West Java, has run the government’s outbreak response immunization (ORI) program, which focuses on children aged 1 to 19, since Dec. 11.

About 59 percent of the targeted 1.9 million people have been inoculated.

Unfortunately, the mass immunization program has yet to stop the outbreak.

The city recorded 109 diphtheria cases with two fatalities at the end of 2017, a significant increase from 17 cases in 2016.

While most of those infected are children, 38.5 percent of adults aged above 19 have also been afflicted by the disease, the Jakarta Health Agency revealed.

On Wednesday, Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan said the city was mulling over the possibility of implementing a mass vaccination program for adults.

Should the program be implemented, Jakarta will be the first province in the country to carry out an adult vaccination program using its own budget.

Jane Supardi, the Health Ministry’s director of surveillance and quarantine who had a meeting with Anies on Wednesday, said the city should start gathering data on adults who had yet to be vaccinated.

She said the diphtheria vaccination program started in 1977 and the number of people participating in it then had been low.

People’s awareness of the vaccine peaked in the 1990s and 80 percent of the children born during that decade were immunized.

“The city should screen the records of residents born from 1977 to 1990 to see whether they had undergone a complete series of vaccinations.

The shots given to those adults will be conducted based on the records,” she said.

Meanwhile, people above 40, who had not undergone the diphtheria vaccination, should be vaccinated three times to be free of the disease, she said.

“We’re still calculating the cost of the program. The administration, like the Health Ministry, will get the vaccine stock from Bio Farma,” Anies said at City Hall, referring to state-owned vaccine manufacturer Bio Farma.

Currently, Bio Farma only provides single-dose vials for adult vaccinations, which is more expensive than multi-dose vials that can be used for mass immunization. A single vial can be used by five to 10 people.

Anies said the city wished that Bio Farma could provide the multi-dose vial stock so that the massive immunization program for adults could be implemented soon.

“We will deliver a letter to Bio Farma so it can prioritize us [in getting the vaccine stock] because we will host the Asian Games,” he said.

The Asian Games will kick off on Aug. 18 in Jakarta and Palembang, South Sumatra, with thousands of participants from 45 Asian countries set to attend.

The Health Ministry has urged all athletes to be vaccinated before entering Indonesia.

The ministry has planned to issue a letter through its international cooperation bureau to inform its counterparts abroad.

It was set to cooperate with the Youth and Sports Ministry to disseminate the information.

Meanwhile, the head of the Jakarta Health Agency, Koesmedi Priharto, said the city would need to allocate about Rp 844 billion (US$62.7 million) to provide single-dose vials to implement the vaccination
program.

Even though the city could use its silpa (unused funds) from the 2017 budget year to procure the vaccines, it still needed to undergo certain processes to formulate the program, Koesmedi said.

He added that the administration had yet to decide when the program would kick off and encouraged people above 19, who had not yet been vaccinated, to pay for it out of their own pocket.

They could get the vaccine for Rp 50,000 at all public health facilities in Jakarta, Koesmedi said.

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