Ten African countries will launch a vast campaign on Monday that is designed to eradicate the crippling disease of polio on the continent once and for all, health officials said.
It is estimated that over 60-million children will be vaccinated, the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) announced in a statement on Friday.
The campaign has been organised by WHO, the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef), Rotary International and the US Centres for Disease Control.
”After eight years of incredible collaboration and investment, Africa is standing on the verge of a well-deserved triumph in public health,” said Ebrahim Samba, WHO Regional Director for the African Region.
”But the disease is now threatening to make a comeback, and the whole continent is on the brink of re-infection unless these campaigns stop the further spread of the virus. Africa has proved it can stop polio — now is the time to finish the job,” he said.
Partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative say that if campaigns over the next several months reach every child, polio in Africa could be stopped in its tracks in 2004.
The countries involved in the campaign are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria and Togo.
Polio is an infectious disease caused by a virus that can strike at any age, but affects mainly children under three-years-old. It causes paralysis, which is almost always permanent. The vaccination process will last three days, during which time medical representatives will go from village to village administering the vaccine to all children.
In the past few months efforts to snuff out the disease altogether suffered a setback after polio began to creep back into seven central and western countries which had previously been clear of it, including the Central African Republic.
Polio recently regained a foothold in Nigeria, too after vaccination campaigns were suspended in three northern states, including Kano.
”The suspension of immunisation campaigns in Kano and the subsequent outbreak of polio in that area was fuelled by unfounded rumours about the safety of polio vaccine,” the statement said.
The Kick Polio Out of Africa campaign launched by former South African president Nelson Mandela and other African leaders in 1996 made it possible to reduce the number of children paralysed by the disease from 205 per day to just 388 in a single year in 2003. Sixteen years after the start of a worldwide push to destroy the
virus only six countries are still haunted by it: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt. – Sapa-AFP