25 May 2015
On Sunday, a number of organizations and health centers in the Kurdistan region of Iraq began a vaccination campaign against polio in all of Dumez camp, and Faida camp in Dohuk province, where they contain Syrian refugees.
Fayez Abdel Halim, a paramedic in the health clinic of the MSF in Dumez camp said to ARA News that «We started to announce the campaign for nearly two weeks through health bulletins which the volunteers were published it among the refugees, and through posters, and medical teams that work continuously in all parts of the camp».
He pointed out that «a special medical center has been set in the camp, where conducted the vaccination operations, the vaccination includes children up to five years». Stressing that «our goal of vaccination campaign that includes all the children in the camp, we know that there are some families ignore these essential things that affect the health of their children, so our volunteers work with doubly hard to codify, and record the names of all the children in the camp, in order to statistics, and compared with the proportion of vaccinated, and find out the proportion of children who have not been vaccinated».
He noted that «the health aspect of camp life is the most important to us, where we are seeking according to available circumstances to for enhance the awareness of refugees and how to create a healthy environment for them and their children».
Dumez camp for Syrian refugees contain more than fifty thousand refugees out of 225 thousand refugees living in four other camps, and in various cities and towns of the region, according to UN statistics.