Bulgarian Parents Seek to Ban Hepatitis-Struck Kids from School

11 September 2006, Monday.

Parents from Bulgaria’s second city of Plovdiv have turned to school headmasters asking them to close the school doors for kids from the city’s Stolipinovo District, where hepatitis has been raging throughout the summer.

School officials are now torn between preventing a wider epidemic and discriminating against the predominantly Roma-populated district.

The regional office of the Red Cross has also expressed their fears that the foul hygienic conditions in the district may soon lead to an outspread of cholera.

Local Red Cross chief Tanya Georgieva explained that they are now launching a mass vaccination action, aiming to give each school-going kid from the district an anti-hepatitis shot before Friday, when the school year will start in Bulgaria.

To urge the Roma families to take their kids to the special vaccination stations, the Red Cross have promised gifts to the first 5,000 who come. Their goal is to manage to give the shot to all 12,500 children from the area in hopes of blocking the outspread.

Close to 400 people from the Stolipinovo District have already been diagnosed with hepatitis over the summer, with the epidemic growing by the day. Electricity and water supplies to the ghetto-like district had been cut off, because residents had systematically failed to pay their bills.