The World Health Organization has announced an epic project to vaccinate about 12 million people against the highly infectious Yellow Fever disease in West Africa.

According to a press release from WHO, the exercise - the largest-ever mass vaccination campaign – begins next week in Benin, Liberia and Sierra Leone. These countries the statement said form part of the ‘13 high-risk countries’ of the continent.

As a UN-supported initiative, the campaign will have local health teams administer the vaccinations and offer a package of pre-emptive measures, including vitamin A, deworming tablets and, in the case of Sierra Leone, additionally administer measles vaccine.

Dr William Perea, WHO Epidemic Readiness and Intervention Unit Coordinator, said: “High vaccination coverage will prevent outbreaks of yellow fever, a disease that is very difficult to diagnose in the early stages of infection. A single dose of the vaccine offers full protection.”

Dr. Perea added that he hoped the vaccination campaigns would be carried out throughout all high risk African countries by 2015.

The release stated that an earlier funding of $103 million that came through of a vaccine-financing partnership called GAVI Alliance, a total of 29 million people have been protected from the disease through mass vaccination programs since 2007. It was conducted in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Senegal and Togo, as well as a first phase completed in Sierra Leone.

“Thirty-seven countries in Africa and the Americas have introduced yellow fever vaccine in their routine childhood immunization schedule up from 12 countries a decade ago,” said the Director of WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele.

Dr. Okwo-Bele however warned that 160 million people could still be at risk in Africa if further funding was not secured for the emergency stockpile and preventive vaccination in the remaining high-risk countries, which are Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria.

“Yellow fever is reappearing in countries that have not reported cases in many years,” added Fenella Avokey, WHO African Regional Office Medical Officer for Yellow Fever Control.

Edward Hoekstra, Senior Health Specialist, UNICEF, said, “Children and adults in West and Central Africa are unnecessarily affected by yellow fever, when one dose of vaccine would prevent them getting the disease at all. We must finish the job we started to sustain the gains achieved so far.”

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