CONTENTS | ANB-BIA HOMEPAGE | WEEKLY NEWS
by Chela and F. Simposya, Zambia, February 1999
THEME = HEALTH
Immunization against childhood diseases
meets with resistance in some villages
Ten-year old Mtonga Kabunda need not have died the way she did. For one week she bled from her nose and eyes because her widowed mother, struggling to keep her other two children alive from an outbreak of measles, could not afford the less than 50 cents to take Mtonga to the clinic.
When measles broke out in Muziyo village in Sinazeze, a mountainous area near the heart of a coal mining town of Maamba, villagers did not know what it was. At a funeral for a 14 year-old girl who died of suspected measles, villagers thought the death was caused by a mysterious disease that eats one up from thin air.
This disease, however, spread quickly to other villages, affecting both young and old. Three of Mrs Merina Siamunyama's children, Lillian, 14; Ronah 16; and Sinamalima 6, were afflicted by measles. She said: "I took them to the clinic, some 15km away where they were treated with others. Mtonga even came to help me look after the three sick children and later returned to the village." When Mrs Siamunyama returned from the clinic with the three children, she found Mtonga unwell. "I found her with a fever. She was also bleeding from the nose and had sore eyes. I thought she was being eaten by a certain thing in her body. I had just returned from the clinic with the other children and I did not have any money to take Mtonga to the clinic."
She tried to give Mtonga some traditional medicine to stop the bleeding. It did not help at all. In fact, her condition continued to get worse. She lamented: "I felt so bad each time I looked at Mtonga. Her condition was so bad it scared me."
Increasingly helpless, she took Mtonga to a traditional herbalist in a nearby village as the last resort. Later, she noticed that her condition had deteriorated and seemed to be little hope for Mtonga. "I went and collected her from the herbalist and carried her on my back. She kept writhing in pain on my back," Mrs Siamunyama explained, trying to hold back her tears. "On my way home, I noticed that Mtonga had stopped struggling and I knew she had died. I placed her lifeless body on the ground and cried for help."
This is one of the several incidents and true stories happening in many parts of rural Zambia divorced from medical centres, compounded by impoverishment and abject poverty. The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, has exacerbated the chronic absence of medical facilities.
As she recollects the trauma of events that led to the death of her daughter, she threw up her arms in despair. "I tried my best, only I did not think of taking her to the clinic; it could have helped. If my daughter had joined me at the clinic or if I had the money to take her there, she would have survived."
A World Vision child survival team moved into the village with government Ministry of Health officials, and conducted a massive child immunization campaign against measles in the surrounding villages. Immunization nurse Mrs Betty Phiri said 707 children aged between six months and 10 years were inoculated against measles. A number of children had to return home without vaccinations because the drugs ran out. "We found that a number of these children who were infected by measles were those who had never been immunized before."
World Vision also provided drugs, two community health workers kits, a bag of mealie meal, and one of high energy protein supplement (HEPS) to the immunization campaign. A makeshift quarantine centre, a sagging mud-and-pole classroom block with worn out grass thatched roof, was opened at Muziyo primary school with nine patients. The patients received treatment for measles for six days.
Muziyo village and other surrounding villages in the area are also known to be strongholds of a Christian sect that has discouraged people from receiving any form of immunization. In August last year, members refused to participate in the government initiated campaign against polio. They urged their members not to take their children for the polio immunization, claiming that the vaccine was actually meant to sterilize the male infants so they do not produce children in the future.
No amount of government education could dissuade the sect from their firm belief. In 1995, 13 people had died of measles in one week in the same area because of the sect's influence. Health officials who rushed to the area found fresh graves but could not get access to those who were ill. The sect believes that its members who are sick can just drink water which has been prayed over, and they will recover. The number of people who died in the area from the outbreak of treatable diseases like measles, was not enough to convince the sect members to change their belief.
The World Vision child survival team is to organize a second immunization campaign to cover the remaining children in the area. But for Mrs Siamunyama, the pain of her daughter's needless death is still plain. "If I had taken her to the clinic, she would have survived."
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