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General Information on Immunisation

Even grown-ups need Vaccinations

COVID-19 vaccine myths debunked

Vaccine safety: 6 common questions answered

General information on Immunization

Covid-19 Vaccines

Immunization

How Vaccines are developed

What is Africa’s vaccine production capacity?

General information on Immunization

 A curated go-to range of reliable information to guide staff and students, continuously updated the various COVID-19 resources. 

South Africa is currently facing a new wave of infections related to the much higher transmissibility of the omicron COVID variant and its sub-variants. The most recent spike has had similar characteristics as the fourth wave in January 2022: increases in infections have not been accompanied by similar increases spikes in hospitalisations and deaths..... Read More

Published: June 2, 2022 4.12pm SAST

Rabies – a viral disease spread through an animal bite – has had an effective vaccine for more than a century. Yet people continue to die from it. Rabies kills nearly every known person that shows clinical signs of it, making it arguably one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.

Africa accounts for 36.4% of the 59,000 rabies deaths in humans annually. In Kenya, rabies is endemic and has been estimated to cause 2,000 deaths annually....Read More

Published: June 2, 2022 4.19pm SAST

There has been an outbreak of monkeypox cases in a number of countries that are not endemic for the virus. Monkeypox is caused by an orthopoxvirus that is closely related to the virus that caused smallpox. Monkeypox is an animal virus that occasionally infects humans after they are bitten or scratched by a monkey or other animal. It does not usually spread easily between humans, and typically only in close contacts. Since May 13, 110 confirmed cases and a further 205 suspected cases had been reported from 12 countries. Virologist Oyewale Tomori explains what Nigeria, where the virus is endemic, should be doing to prepare for an outbreak....Read More

Published: May 25, 2022 10.44am SAST

The history of vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa dates back to 1881, when Egypt’s Vacsera company was established. Before the COVID pandemic was declared, there were eight African countries that, to our knowledge, had a record of vaccine manufacturing facilities (see the map). They were: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia (North Africa); Nigeria and Senegal (West Africa); Ethiopia (East Africa); and South Africa.

Between them they had 14 facilities.....Read More

Published: May 10, 2022 3.45pm SAST

The COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19 vaccines rollout, by their unprecedented nature and record timelines respectively, further strengthen the importance of safety surveillance. To support stakeholders in conducting safety surveillance, the World Health Organisation has published the “COVID-19 Vaccines: Safety Surveillance Manual”. This manual is a comprehensive set of guidelines that all countries are encouraged to leverage as a core document in ensuring the successful safety surveillance of their populations during their COVID-19 vaccine(s) rollout. The World Health Organisation has also released a protocol for active vaccine safety surveillance titled “Cohort event monitoring (CEM) for safety signal detection after vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines” – based on the principles outlined in the WHO COVID-19 Vaccines Safety Surveillance Manual – and has published interim guidance to aid “Evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness”.......Read More

Published May 2021