The Ministry of Health and Population is conducting a two-day nationwide campaign to administer vitamin A supplement and deworming tablets to children aged between six months and five years on Wednesday and Thursday.

Officials say the campaign will be crucial in preventing many childhood diseases and reducing the mortality rate among children under five.

“We urge all parents of children under five to make sure their children receive vitamin A supplement and deworming tablets from the distribution points in their localities,” said Lila Bikram Thapa, chief of the Nutrition Section at the Family Welfare Division under the Department of Health Services.

The ministry aims to administer vitamin A supplements to around 2.7 million children aged between six months and five years. Over 2.4 million children above 12 months will also be given deworming tablets.

Around 52,000 female community health volunteers serving throughout the country will be deployed for the campaign. The Health Ministry has been conducting the campaign twice every year—in April and in October—since 2003.

It is because of campaigns like these that problems like night blindness that affected a large number of children until two decades ago, have been almost eliminated, according to Thapa.

The vitamin A campaign is a success story in Nepal, as it has helped tackle the issue of vitamin A deficiency among children, which used to be a major public health problem in the country. It is estimated that regular supplementation campaigns have reduced deaths among children under five by 23 percent.

These programmes, officials say, had coverage rates of over 94 percent, the highest among all health campaigns run in the country in the past, but has declined to over 80 percent due to the Covid pandemic.

In 2020, a lot of children may have missed out on vitamin A supplementation and deworming because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The United Nations Children’s Fund in its report said that worldwide only two out of five children received the life-saving benefit of vitamin A supplementation in 2020.

Officials in Nepal, however, claimed that despite the risk of the coronavirus infection, the coverage rate of the vitamin A supplement and deworming tablet did not decline much.

Child health experts say vitamin A supplementation campaigns are important for the overall growth of children and for protecting them from various infectious diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, children deficient in vitamin A are prone to visual impairment (night blindness) and illnesses like measles and diarrhoea, among others.