Mass vaccination campaign to protect refugee children under the age of 5 starts

ANKARA

AA photo

Turkey’s Ministry of Health, with the support of UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), is conducting a campaign to complete the vaccination of all refugee children under the age of five. 

Children are being vaccinated in all of the country’s 81 provinces by staff from the ministry between Feb. 15 and Feb. 28.

All vaccines are being provided free and being officially registered is not a requisite for vaccination. The International Middle East Peace Research Center (IMPR) humanitarian aid group is supporting the campaign with its 103 staff in 16 provinces.

According to the latest United Nations figures, Turkey is hosting 2.75 million Syrians. Some 300,000 live in camps and 2.45 million, (over 90 percent of the total), live in host communities.

The World Bank recently announced that it had partnered with a number of Turkish agencies and the European Union to construct schools for Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım on Feb. 10 urged the world to “do its fair share” to help solve problems in the region, saying that Turkey is hosting three million refugees without sufficient support from other countries.