National Deworming in Yemen Continues Unabated During Arab Spring Uprising

Yemen’s attempt to control schistosomiasis and intestinal helminths continues successfully despite the widespread civil unrest in the country.

Yemen’s attempt to control schistosomiasis and intestinal helminths continues successfully despite the widespread civil unrest in the country. The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative is supported by the Global Network to provide technical assistance to this World Bank-funded programme.

Currently in its first operational year, a treatment round that took place in the middle of the unrest in April 2011 has successfully reached two million people in highly infected areas.  Already it has achieved the coverage of 86% of school-aged children, surpassing the World Health Organization recommended target of 75%. Crucially, this included both enrolled and non-enrolled children, the latter thought to be at particular risk of developing disease.

Another round is planned for December 2011, expanding to another one million people who are asking for treatment, even in security compromised areas.

An important impact of the unrest has been the displacement of large numbers of internal refugees in the country. These Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are moving from highly endemic to less infected areas, raising the risk of ‘seeding’ the new area with infection. To combat this, special campaigns are being carried out to reach vulnerable IDPs in temporary camps in Aden and Lahj in the south of the country.

These projects demonstrate the advantage of having an adaptable control approach and of exploiting the valuable local knowledge of health workers to overcome these barriers.

The populations in these areas are facing and will continue to face many different challenges in the weeks and months to come.  Thanks to the hard work of the Yemen control programme, schistosomiasis and intestinal worms are one important challenge that is being solved.