Focus heightens on vaccine preventable diseases

Nigeria is better off preventing diseases than attempting cures on a continent with some of the highest disease burdens, say experts.

This comes as the first indigenous vaccine manufacturer, Innovative Vaccines, launched in Nigeria.

Virologist, Dr Simon Agwale, said, “With the upsurge of poverty in Africa, curative medicine will rather be cumbersome, and to an extent far less effective.”

Speaking at the launch in Abuja, he said Nigeria needed sensitisation to combat vaccine-preventable diseases.
“Although some developing countries have ventured into vaccine production recently, no modern biotechnology company that produces vaccines exists in Africa, except one in Senegal,” said Dr  Agwale.

“That is why we initiated local vaccine production and established high technological diagnosis for antibody titre testing.”

Innovative Vaccines researches past and future challenges of medicine and has stocked vaccines for typhoid, hepatitis, polio, meningitis, rabies, tetanus, cholera,” said Dr Agwale.

He also said there is need for typhoid conjugate vaccine, which protects both children and adults for life and this can be found in Nigeria now.

Tanimu Adabson, a director at Innovative Vaccines, said, “The efficacy of vaccines has become worrisome because some people still come down with ailments they were vaccinated against.

“With our modern equipment, people can know ailments they are protected against and the ones they need to be vaccinated,” he said.