Outside a half-built orphanage on a desolate Haitian plain, dozens of children, foreign diplomats, government ministers and international health officials launched the first pan-American immunization week on Saturday, which began simultaneously in all 35 countries of the Americas.
Some 200 Haitian children marched in a circle, waving flags from countries across the hemisphere and sporting T-shirts that read in Creole "Vaccination is an act of love."
Fond Parisien, near Haiti's southeast border with the Dominican Republic, is one of the most impoverished towns in the poorest country in the Americas, and that was the point: "The impact of the campaign is to reach the unreachable," said Mirta Roses Periago, director of the Pan American Health Organization, which organized the initiative with the UN Children's Fund.
The goal is to immunize 40 million children against measles, tetanus and other such easily preventable diseases that kill thousands of young people around the world every week, according to Nils Kastberg, UNICEF regional director for the Americas.
According to UNICEF, the priorities are vaccinating children against measles, polio and rubella, but some countries have different needs. Brazil, for example, is focusing on protecting the elderly against influenza.
The last regional outbreak of polio occurred on the island of Hispaniola. In 2000, eight cases were reported in Haiti. This was the first report of polio in the region since 1991, when it was found in Peru. Also in 2000, 1,500 cases of measles were reported in Haiti.
A quick immunization campaign was launched that wiped out both diseases by the end of 2001, said James Dobbins, a Haiti-based data consultant for PAHO.
But Jon Kim Andrus, chief of PAHO's immunization unit, said Haiti's recent political upheaval created the kind of economic and social climate that can trigger another outbreak, with the infrastructure destroyed and government health workers left unpaid.
"The government of Haiti can't purchase a syringe let alone a vaccine, so everything must be donated," said Chris Barrett, head of the US AID health program in Haiti.
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