Kabul - The United Nations began immunising nine million Afghan children against measles yesterday in a project it hopes will prevent 35,000 deaths from the disease each year in the war-torn country.
Thousands of mothers queued up with their children at about 200 vaccination centres at mosques and hospitals around the capital in the first stage of the project that will cover the whole nation by March, UN officials said.
"Measles is the number one killer among vaccine-preventable diseases in Afghanistan," said Mr Baba Danbappa, head of the survival section of the UN children's agency Unicef in Afghanistan. "By doing this, we are going to save about 35,000 children every year.
"We had restrictions before - we couldn't go to certain areas because of the frontlines," he said of a land where peace is being restored after a US-led coalition crushed the Taliban government in November, halting years of civil war.
"With only 40 per cent coverage, we couldn't prevent outbreaks and were not reaching the number of children we should have." At the immunisation centre of the Khair Khana 52-bed hospital on the edge of Kabul, about 380 children were vaccinated yesterday morning alone, compared with an average 130-180 people per day before the start of the project.
Vaccine-preventable diseases claim about 1.7 million lives every year, of which 45.5 per cent are due to measles, UN officials say.