After requesting the minister, Contagem will receive doses of dengue vaccine

Contagem City Hall will receive doses of dengue vaccine and is preparing to start immunizing teenagers. The information was confirmed to Itatiaia, this Monday (29), by Mayor Marília Campos (PT). Until then, only Belo Horizonte and some cities in the metropolitan region were awarded doses of the vaccine, targeting children and adolescents aged 10 to 14 years.

The mayor said she personally asked the Minister of Health, Nísia Trindade, for the vaccines to be sent to Contagem, during a visit made by the head of the department last Friday (26) to Minas Gerais. She was alongside President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) at the inauguration event of an insulin factory.

In the coming days, Contagem City Hall will publish the immunization calendar, locations and target audience that will be served with the vaccines.

“I appealed to the minister at the last meeting and the news arrived that Contagem will start receiving [as vacinas], especially for teenagers. We don’t have an estimate yet [sobre as doses]but we will announce it soon”, he told the reporter.

Marília recalled that the municipality opened two hydration centers in the Ressaca and Eldorado neighborhoods and that vaccines will be essential for fighting the disease next year.

“Dengue has already stabilized with the change in weather and, now, it will begin to decline. The vaccine will be important for next year, to reduce the symptoms of dengue, which makes so many people sick,” he added.

In addition to Belo Horizonte, in greater BH, the doses had already been distributed to the cities of Nova Lima, Caeté, Sabará, Ribeirão das Neves, Rio Acima, among others.

According to the Ministry of Health, the selected health regions met three criteria: they have at least one large municipality, that is, more than 100 thousand inhabitants, with high dengue transmission recorded in 2023 and 2024, and with a greater predominance of DENV-2 serotype. As a result, 16 states and the Federal District had municipalities that met the requirements to start vaccination from this year.

Initially, the Ministry of Health stated that 22 cities would have the vaccines in this initial stretch. The Federal Government guarantees that Brazil is the first country in the world to offer the vaccine in the universal public system. The Ministry of Health incorporated the dengue vaccine in December 2023.

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