Kinshasa, November 5th, 2025 (CPA). The introduction of a new vaccine against measles and rubella called ‘RR’ is scheduled for November 27th to December 1st, 2025 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Minister of Public Health, Hygiene and Social Welfare announced on Wednesday in Kinshasa during a press briefing. « The second highly contagious disease is measles…it is often confused with rubella, which presents the same symptoms. Today, we are introducing a vaccine that combines the two because when we vaccinated children against measles, we realized that the same children could still develop rashes…and mothers say that their children are suffering from the same disease, but it is actually rubella… These are the two diseases for which we are going to introduce a combined vaccine called the “measles and rubella vaccine” (MMR), scheduled for November 27th November to December 1st, 2025, » said Dry Samuel Roger Kamba, Minister in charge of Health. « Because we want to eliminate these two diseases as much as possible and prevent families from opposing vaccination. For these two diseases, we will vaccinate almost all provinces by the end of this month. We will do this in blocks, starting with the provinces of Katanga, Bas-Uélé, Haut-Uélé and Ituri this year, with the second block to follow in 2026, » he added. This vaccination campaign will target more than 30 million children aged 0 to 59 months and children aged 9 to 14 years for catch-up vaccinations. Dr. Kamba said that the Ministry in charge of Health, through the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) and with the support of all technical and financial partners, is committed to the eradication of polio and the control and surveillance of measles and rubella in the country. ‘Together, we have proven that the DRC can defeat polio, measles and rubella. Together, we will write the final page of this historic struggle,’ he said.
The polio vaccination campaign, scheduled for November 27th to 29th, 2025
In addition, the Minister of Health also announced a national polio vaccination campaign scheduled for November 27th to 29th, which aims to protect 28,431,252 children aged 0 to 59 months. « In 2022, we had 540 cases of polio in the country; in 2023, we were down to about 284 cases; and now we are at eight cases in 2025. This is due to vaccine-related variants, meaning that wild polio has been eradicated, but we still have cases linked to vaccination, » he explained. The minister said that there are only two countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan that still have a few cases of wild polio. In the DRC, efforts are being made to completely eradicate the disease. The doctor emphasized that several challenges remain in eradicating polio in the DRC, including insecurity in certain areas, delays in transporting samples to the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) and maintaining the cold chain. ACP/