Prime
Egypt gives Uganda 3m doses of FMD vaccines
Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is an infectious disease that affects cloven-hoofed or divided hoofed animals. Photo/File
What you need to know:
- According to information from the Agriculture Ministry, the three million doses of FMD vaccines will add to the 900,000 doses that were dispatched to 46 districts two weeks ago.
The Egyptian government has given Uganda three million doses of the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) vaccine to boost efforts to curb the current outbreak affecting some parts of the country.
The agriculture minister, Mr Frank Tumwebaze, said the vaccines were received yesterday by a team from the ministry and Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Chief of Defence Forces.
“We received this afternoon a consignment of three million [doses of] FMD vaccine delivered by Egyptian Air Force cargo plane,” the minister said.
The development followed the Wednesday meeting held by the agriculture minister with a delegation of Egyptian officials at his office in Kampala in which the plan to coordinate with Ugandan scientists to start making FMD vaccines locally was also discussed. The government is going to pay for the vaccines at a subsised price of $0.9 per dose, lower than current price of around $2 per dose.
According to Wednesday’s statement by the National Agricultural Organisation (NARO), the delegation led by Major General Mohsen Abdel Hakam Azouz, the director of the Veterinary Service Department in Egypt, said this would be the first batch of the 10 million vaccines Egypt is prepared to dispatch to Uganda.
Staff Brig-Gen Mohamed, the defense attaché at the Egyptian Embassy in Kampala, was quoted by NARO as saying the vaccines were part of the national reserves for Egypt, but a directive was given by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to dispatch them to Uganda after learning of the current FMD outbreak.
“His Excellency President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ordered a quick supply of 6 million doses of the vaccine from Egypt’s strategic reserves to help our brothers in Uganda overcome the pandemic quickly...,” Brig-Gen Mohamed was quoted by NARO as saying.
According to the statement, the delegation members, including Prof Mohamed Ahmed Saad, the Director of the Veterinary Serum and Vaccine Research Institute in Egypt, and Dr Abdel-Hamid Bazid of the MEVAC Company, were experts specialised in producing the required vaccines with international quality, and they were here to explore technical cooperation between the two countries in vaccine production.
Minister Tumwebaze, according to the statement, commended the two governments for the cooperation that saw the country get the first batch of the vaccines.
He was also quoted as saying the goal was to enhance collaboration to produce a quadrivalent vaccine with serotypes O, A, SAT-1, and SAT-2 that can curb the four strains of FMD in Uganda.
According to information from the Agriculture Ministry, the three million doses of FMD vaccines will add to the 900,000 doses that were dispatched to 46 districts two weeks ago.
