ROURKELA: A 10-year-old schoolboy died after being administered Tetanus-Diphtheria vaccine during an immunisation drive in the Sundargarh district on Thursday night.
Following the death of Sumanjit Pradhan, a Class V student of Mahima school at Sector-6 here, the district health administration hurriedly suspended the immunisation drive on Friday and also ordered an inquiry into the incident.
Sumanjit was administered the vaccine at his school on Thursday. But later in the night, he complained of illness and was admitted to the Ispat General Hospital (IGH) of SAIL where he succumbed. His parents, Sukanta and Monica, claimed that their son was healthy and normal and died after taking the vaccine.
As the news of the boy’s death spread, the district health administration went into a tizzy. Sundargarh Chief District Medical and Public Health Officer Dr Pankaj Patel said, for now, the immunisation programme has been suspended. A multi-member fact-finding team of the Health department would conduct a detailed inquiry into the incident.
Postmortem has been conducted on the body and the autopsy report is awaited to ascertain the cause of death. Patel said the fact-finding team would separately conduct ‘verbal autopsy’ and gather all relevant information relating to the period before and after Sumanjit’s vaccination to analyse the cause of his death.
Though the immunisation drive has been suspended, those seeking immunisation of their children voluntarily were given the vaccines across the district, Patel added.
The district administration has set a target to cover 91,296 children aged 10 years and above. By Thursday, 49 per cent of the target has been achieved.
Earlier in May last year, a three-month-old baby girl had died in Malgodam slum hours after taking the second dose of Rotavirus, Oral polio and Pentavalent IM (Intramuscular) vaccine. The baby’s parents had alleged that she died after vaccination.