Needle-free System Selected for Polio Immunization Campaign

 PharmaJet® today announced that their Tropis® Intradermal (ID) Needle-free System will be used in a house-to-house polio immunization campaign.

Over a quarter million PharmaJet’s needle-free intradermal syringes have been provided to support this initiative.

The campaign will be conducted in two rounds to reduce the immunity gap significantly against type-2 poliovirus. Young children will receive the needle-free polio vaccine and novel oral polio vaccine (nOPV2) to achieve 95% coverage in each round.

The polio campaign, a collaboration of the African Field Epidemiology Network, WHO, UNICEF, BMGF, GAVI, and U.S. CDC, targets over 170,000 children in Somalia.

The most recent evidence for human circulating vaccine-derived polio virus-2 was in March 2024.

Through the Somalia Emergency Action Plan, the country will continue to work with humanitarian partners to reach about 1.5 million zero-dose children, most of whom live in the country’s highly populated central and southern areas.

Paul LaBarre, Vice President of Global Business Development at PharmaJet, commented in a press release on June 27, 2024, “In Somalia, we are eager to build on previous house-to-house campaign experience that demonstrates how needle-free enables vaccination teams to move quickly and achieve high coverage without the burden of sharps waste management and with reduced vaccine volume and cold chain logistics.”

The U.S. CDC reissued a Global Polio Alert on May 23, 2024, regarding polio outbreaks and poliovirus detections in 34 countries. The CDC recommends that visitors to these countries be fully vaccinated against polio.