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After graduating from medical school in 2012, Fadario had a dream: to help vaccinate as many Angolan children as possible and reduce vaccine-preventable deaths.
Thanks to the joint efforts of all levels of government, domestic and international partners, civil society and the general public, Fadario has made significant achievements in immunization in recent years, with Angola being certified as a wild polio-free country in 2015 and introducing new vaccines such as pneumococcal vaccine, rotavirus vaccine and measles-rubella vaccine. In 2020 and 2021, disruptions related to COVID-19 vaccination efforts overwhelmed the health system, resulting in serious setbacks and many children being unable to receive vaccinations.
Despite the progress, Angola still faces many challenges in improving immunization indicators and reducing vaccine-preventable deaths. The country needs to ensure effective management of vaccines and vaccination materials, avoid stock-outs, and guarantee the availability of vaccines at all vaccination stations. In addition, it is necessary to increase vaccination coverage for all antigens in all municipalities across the country and implement supplementary vaccination activities for target diseases such as polio, measles and maternal tetanus.
Fadalío, who has extensive experience working in the health sector, is aware of these challenges. At the age of 20, he joined the Ministry of Health’s Department of Public Health as an immunization technician and became a WHO immunization officer in 2001. As a WHO officer, he worked in different parts of the country and the Republic of Mozambique.
He recalled with pride the work carried out in Mozambique. Drawing on the experience in Angola, he supported the introduction of a model that involved other community players in the use of polio vaccines, which had previously been administered only by health technicians. This approach helped increase community engagement, reduce vaccine refusal, and significantly improve vaccination coverage in Mozambique. He called the experience a perfect example of peer-to-peer country learning promoted by WHO.
Currently based in Benguela Province in southern Angola, Fadario is responsible for proactively searching for cases of acute flaccid paralysis in children in hospitals and communities, training health workers and other personnel involved in the public health event detection process, and ensuring the training of vaccinators and post-vaccination surveillance teams.
“Every child should be vaccinated. Vaccines are one of the greatest achievements of medicine and through them we have the potential to prevent and protect our children from diseases, especially polio, which causes paralysis in children.”
To vaccinate all children and ensure a polio-free world, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has developed three key strategies that are also being implemented in Angola: routine polio vaccination, polio supplementary immunization activities, and acute flaccid paralysis surveillance.
Angola is successfully implementing these strategies and is on the right track to maintaining its polio-free status, and Dr. Fekado Lema, Coordinator of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Angola, remains confident: Despite challenges such as high cross-border population movement and multiple informal border crossings, which pose a risk of importing poliovirus, Angola can accelerate immunization and protect all children from polio by integrating polio vaccination with other health interventions and services and ensuring that local governments are actively involved in the vaccination program. Despite the ongoing challenges of implementing a vaccination program for all children, Fadario has no doubt: it is possible and together we will ensure a world without polio and without deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Distributed by the APO Group on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO) – Angola.
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