Skopje, 6 March 2024 (MIA) — Children who have not been vaccinated against pertussis with the DTaP vaccine will be banned from day care centers only if the recommendation issued by the Infectious Diseases Commission to contain the whooping cough epidemic on Skopje is adopted by the Ministry of Health and if it instructs health inspectors to carry out special audits, according to State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate director Renata Mladenovska at a press conference Wednesday.

Speaking about the Infectious Diseases Commission's session on Tuesday, when it convened to discuss preventing the spread of whooping cough, Mladenovska said the State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate was currently tasked only with sanctioning parents who were refusing to vaccinate their children. Their health inspectors, she said, were carrying out audits of vaccination sites to look into vaccination documentation, as instructed by the Ministry of Health.

Asked whether inspectors had issued any fines yet, Mladenovska said they had. "Yes. Regularly, given that the vaccination points send us their lists of parents with their children's first and last names," she said.

"We have been issuing a lot of fines," she said. "How this ends is the more important question. Some parents agree to pay the fine, but that doesn't solve the problem because the child still remains unvaccinated."

"Some parents don't want to pay the fine and end up in court, where they are issued a warning and have to pay the legal costs," Mladenovska said.

She said the Infectious Diseases Commission's latest recommendation that health inspectors should carry out special audits in day care centers to see if they admitted children unvaccinated against whooping cough was an attempt to contain the pertussis epidemic declared on the territory of Skopje. However, she recalled, the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy's inspectors were the ones whose duty it was to check the vaccination status of children in day care centers.

"The competence of the State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate is ito sanction parents who did not vaccinate their child," she said, adding that fines ranged from EUR 300 to 650, paid in denars.

She reiterated that health inspectors did not currently inspect vaccination status certificates of children attending day care centers.

"In line with the Law on the Protection of the Population against Infectious Diseases, both in the case of the declared measles epidemic of 2019 and in the case of the active pertussis epidemic, the State Sanitary and Health Inspectorate will ban children who had not received the DTaP vaccine from day care centers only if the recommendation of the Infectious Diseases Commission, as an advisory body of the Minister of Health, is adopted, and if the Ministry of Health instructs the inspectorate to carry out special audits in day care centers aimed at inspecting the vaccination certificates on DTaP vaccines provided by the vaccination points," Mladenovska said.

Until then, she said, the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy will continue its own inspections that have been going on since the epidemic began.

She added that health inspectors would be inspecting vaccination sites nationwide also "from a sanitary and hygienic point of view," to see if they had adequate vaccine transport coolers, if they disposed of medical waste properly, and if they had sufficient anti-shock therapy. mr/