Africa on brink of polio epidemic, warns WHO
Africa is on the brink of the biggest polio epidemic in recent years, with the crippling disease re-emerging in Sudan’s conflict-ravaged Darfur region, the World Health Organisation said today.
“There is no question that the virus is spreading at an alarming pace,” said Dr David Heymann, who heads the UN health agency’s attempts to eradicate polio.
WHO confirmed that a child was paralysed by polio on May 20 in Darfur, the first case in Sudan in more than three years.
Although the number of individual cases is relatively small, the disease has struck in 13 African countries this year after being limited to only three nations at the beginning of last year.
But epidemiologists fear a major epidemic this fall – the start of the polio 'high season' – leaving thousands of African children paralysed for life, said WHO in Geneva.
Health experts have long warned of looming epidemics in Darfur, where thousands have been killed and more than one million left homeless in a 15 month conflict between Arab militias, backed by the Sudanese government, and the black African population.
The Sudan case is the latest setback in WHO’s campaign to wipe out polio worldwide by the end of next year, as the virus spreads from Nigeria – the epicentre of the African epidemic – and continues to strike in Niger, sub-Saharan Africa’s other polio-endemic nation.
Besides Sudan, the virus has been found in previously polio-free sub-Saharan African countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo.
Botswana, in southern Africa, also reported its first new infection in February.
The other four of the world’s polio-endemic countries – Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India – are still on schedule with vaccines aimed at stopping transmission of the disease before the end of the year, said WHO.
Polio usually infects children under the age of five through contaminated drinking water and attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and, in some cases, death.
The battle against the disease has stalled in the face of resistance to immunisation programmes in Nigeria’s heavily Muslim Kano state.
Kano suspended a vaccine campaign for six months after some Islamic leaders claimed that the vaccines were part of a US plot to spread infertility and AIDS among Africans – something Nigerian federal officials and the United Nations have vigorously denied.
When WHO and other organisations launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, 125 countries were affected by the disease.
It has since been eradicated in Europe, the Americas, much of Asia and Australia.
