1,158 children in Borno State are undergoing treatment from measles in Maiduguri, Borno State capital.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) also known as Doctors Without Borders, made this known on Friday.
Statistics indicate 58% of the children admitted at the hospital are from Zabarmari, a volatile small settlement of about 45,000 people located 20km away from Maiduguri.
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The duration of the outbreak, according to MSF Head of Mission David Therond shows: “The first child affected by measles was admitted in Gwange Paediatric hospital on 3rd December, 2020 and the number of patients has been increasing since then in Maiduguri hospitals,” adding: “A vaccination campaign is required to see the number of cases decrease.”
Therond informed that MSF launched an aggressive response to the outbreak by strengthening the hospitalisation capacity in Gwange and Fori health facilities through increasing the number of beds from 65 to 105 in Gwange.
Due to the challenge of access to Zabarmari community MSF developed a partnership with the health authorities in the town of Zabarmari with a local team comprising of ten community health workers and a nurse.
This team in Zabarmari is supervised by a mobile team coming from Maiduguri to support the local primary health care and refer severe cases to the Gwange paediatric hospital in Maiduguri.