Health workers face 'severe logistical challenges' to vaccinating Maasai tribes in Tanzania

Dec 7 2012

Chris Endean of the GAVI Alliance writes ahead of the GAVI Partners Forum in a CNN opinion piece about efforts to vaccinate members of the Maasai tribes in Tanzania's Arusha National Park. Noting Maasai tribes are "constantly on the move searching for water and fresh pasture for their cattle," he describes "severe logistical challenges" health workers face when trying to reach their patients and notes, "The need to get to hard-to-reach people like the Maasai and the rest of the estimated eight percent of Tanzania's population that do not receive basic life-saving vaccines has taken on a new urgency with the country's recent launch of a five-year development plan" called the "One Plan." Endean notes the forum is taking place in the country's capital, Dar es Salaam, and that during the event, "the health ministry will launch two new vaccines into the national immunization program -- pneumococcal and rotavirus -- tackling the primary causes of pneumonia and diarrhea -- two of the leading killers of under-fives in Tanzania" (12/5).