PESHAWAR, Jan 15: For the past two months, people have been unable to immunise their newborn babies against tuberculosis and eight other diseases because the hospitals lack proper facilities for keeping the vaccines refrigerated.

An official said: “The health department is finding it hard to ensure a proper supply of the Bacillus Camate Guerain (BCG) to hospitals in the city and in many hospitals in districts. It is administered to the children from the day one of their birth up to 45th day to protect them against TB.”

Sources said that there was no BCG vaccine in Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu and Kohat districts as well as in the Malaknad and Hazara divisions.

The provincial health department’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) has been providing free of cost vaccines for BCG and seven other immunisable diseases.

Vaccines are absent from the market because they needed to be stored at a certain temperature, officials said.

Many people bought their babies to hospitals in the city but they were unable to get the vaccines there, an EPI technician said.

EPI’s deputy director Dr Waheed Khan also confirmed that the vaccines were not available for the past two months, adding that for the past month they had been supplying hospitals from their reserve stocks but now it had exhaused.

Officials of the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad said that the institute also faced a shortage of BCG vaccine, adding that it had earlier imported the vaccines to overcome the shortage and provided the vaccines to hospitals in the provinces.

The institute, which supplied vaccines to the health institutions in the country, had indicated that the vaccines would be made available next week, the official said.