By Akeem Oduyoye
The Gombe State Medical Store located around Kasuwa-Katako around 2am on Monday, 19 February, 2024 gutted by fire destroying N15 billion polio vaccines, medical equipment and consumables.
The state governor, Muhammadu Yahaya, made this disclosure to newsmen shortly after he visited the burnt store.
The governor, after touring and assessing the level of destruction, described the incident as unfortunate, just as he also disclosed that measures were being put in place to unravel the cause and prevent future occurrences.
“Maternal and Child care equipment and also two million doses of poliovirus vaccines which are very difficult to come by were burnt and this store serves not only Gombe but in fact the entire North-East. This is because of the essential commodities but it’s the wish of God, there is nothing we can do.
“We have directed the fire service to come and give an assessment of what caused it so that we can mitigate against such thing happening in the future.
“Nonetheless, we will urge all stakeholders especially donor and development partners especially UNICEF, WHO and so on to intervene immediately since we are already hitting the first quarter. We need vaccine for meningitis, there is onset of cholera we need to do a lot.”
“I have directed the Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport to immediately see what measures we need to take to prevent such from happening in the future,” Yahaya added.
Speaking on the incident, the state Commissioner for Health, Dr Habu Dahiru, said “The commodities are not only vaccines. We also received motorcycles, maternal and child health equipment that are in the store, they were given to us by Rotary International, and we also have equipment from the Primary Health Care Development Agency that is being distributed to maternities and PHCs to improve service delivery in those areas then we have public health commodities like family planning, nutrition immunisation.
“The cost implication is about N5 billion. If you see the naira exchange rate now, you can imagine how much is one dollar of polio MOPV for that matter that is the most potent polio vaaccine is very costly if you covert it from dollar to naira the equipment too.
“This is just rough estimate a committee has been instituted to take inventory and itemised them not only that I have also instituted fire service department to give us immediate cause of the incident and what measures to prevent further occurrence,” Dahiru added.