Outbreak

The re-scheduling is necessary as it will allow the Emergency Operations Centre to regroup and increase resources to meet the demand.

The high turnout of children at the designated areas for vaccination in Morobe, Madang and Eastern Highlands provinces indicates that the demand is high and further showing the commitment and concern of parents of children under the age of 5.

The high figures are promising and enabling the vaccinators to protect more children under 5 years old in the three provinces of Morobe, Madang and Eastern Highlands.

The first large-scale outbreak of the C strain in decades has already killed 800 of 12,000 infected people in Nigeria and in neighboring Niger this year, according to the World Health Organization.

"We've never seen this before with meningitis C," William A. Perea, coordinator of WHO's Control of Epidemic Diseases Unit, said of the resurgence of the strain.