The Ashaiman Municipal Director of Health Services, Dr Sophia Quist, has advised parents to immunise and vaccinate their children from the first day of their birth up to the fifth year, in order to save them from preventable diseases.
She said most parents took things for granted that once the child was born, nature would take care of it; but that should not be the case because the child enters a different environment as soon as it is born and parents need to take care of the environmental influence on the child.
“It is very, very important for our children to be immunised or vaccinated as we use the word interchangeably because most often, when we are born, we do not know the pathogen that can easily kill us.”
“And so that is the reason why we are advocating immunisation centres we have here in Ashaiman and the country at large, for mothers to have access to the facility for immunisation/vaccination services,” Dr Quist emphasised.
Dr Quist was addressing parents at a Town Hall Meeting organised by the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), in collaboration with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), on immunisation at Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region on the theme: “Every child deserves a healthy future, invest in your child by weighing regularly.”
The parents
She said immunisation was key to children’s health and it was important for GHS in collaboration with the NCCE to continue to play collaborative roles in advocating immunisation/vaccination for parents to understand the concept and patronise it for the sake of their babies.
The Ashaiman Municipal Health Director explained that once the child is immunised or vaccinated, the body now recognises the antigen in case the child is exposed to any pathogen that would harm the body.
She likened the explanation to what happened during the COVID-19 period when people with ailments such as diabetes and hypertension died because their bodies had already been compromised and they could not fight the germs.
Dr Quist said the GHS was aware of challenges that mothers faced, especially in coming to the health facilities for immunisation as a result of where they stayed and advised such mothers to patronise the services of GHS Community Health Nurses who went to them in their various communities for the same services.
The Ashaiman Municipal Disease Control Officer of the GHS, Joana Oyeebo, took the parents through vaccination matters, child health services, key challenges to vaccine updates in Ghana and the benefits of vaccination among others and entreated them to take immunisation/vaccination issues seriously.
The NCCE Municipal Director, Salvata Mawulorm Koku, stated that if parents did not send their babies for immunisation/vaccination, such children would have ailing future which would affect the whole country because ailing persons cannot work.
She, therefore, appealed to caregivers such as mothers (and grandmothers) to take good care of the children by sending them to weighing centres for vaccination/immunisation, as the commission was also committed to ensuring that it partnered GHS to preach the immunisation/vaccination message to the general public.
The Greater Accra Regional Director of NCCE, Mawuli Agbenu, said children needed the vaccines to grow and become healthy citizens and advised the parents not to listen to people who come to them with excuses that the vaccines are not good for the children, as such excuses are lies.
