An outbreak of polio in Botswana has dealt a fresh blow to the global campaign to eradicate the disease and confirmed fears that it has vaulted across Africa since some states in Nigeria suspended vaccinations.
A seven-year-old boy in the north-western district of Ngami was this week diagnosed with paralytic polio, Botswana’s first case in 13 years. The virus has now spread to nine African countries and Nigeria is its presumed source.
The Botswana government began an emergency immunisation campaign with help from United Nations agencies and Rotary International. The condition of the boy, whose paralysis started on February 8, was not revealed.
In addition to starting to immunise all children, Botswana has heightened disease surveillance and notified neighbouring countries.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said laboratory checks of the virus showed it was genetically similar to a polio strain endemic to northern Nigeria, where Muslim clerics have banned vaccinations.
Investigations are under way to establish how the virus jumped from west to southern Africa. ”Children across Africa will continue to be at risk of polio from such importations until the disease is eradicated everywhere,” the WHO said in a statement from its Geneva headquarters.
Last year the UN agency appeared close to its goal of completely eradicating the disease after a 16-year, $3-billion campaign to immunise 2-billion children in 200 countries with cheap, effective vaccine droplets.
From being endemic to 125 countries, the disease was confined to just six: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Niger. The number of cases fell from 350 000 in 1988 to fewer than 1 000 last year. Hopes were high that this or next year would see polio eradicated from the world forever.
Instead, the disease which can wither limbs, paralyse and kill has made a comeback with northern Nigeria identified as its source. Several Muslim states there suspended the WHO-approved vaccinations last August after claims that the campaign was a western plot to sterilise Muslims or infect them with HIV.
Some 400 polio cases have been reported in Nigeria since August and it appears to have leapfrogged across western and central Africa to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo, and is now in southern Africa.
Last month all Nigeria’s northern states, except Kano, resumed the immunisations.
The authorities in Kano triggered last year’s boycott when they announced that state scientists had discovered traces of estradiol in the vaccine, a type of the hormone oestrogen found in oral contraceptives.
Islamic radicals seized on this as evidence that the vaccines were part of a western plot to harm Muslims. Muslim leaders in Kano, and initially in some other largely Islamic Nigerian states, argued that the vaccine was unsafe and contained impurities that might be aimed at reducing fertility.
The region’s supreme council for sharia said last month that it would continue an ”enlightenment campaign for our people to jettison the vaccines”.
Analysts suspected that the boycott was a scare tactic by the northern states to discredit President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian head of a federal government they loathe.
Most of the states lifted the ban after health experts and Muslim leaders testing the vaccine in South Africa, India and Indonesia said it was safe.
Obasanjo also won over a key Muslim leader, Mohammed Maccido, who called for immunisations to resume.
Kano has continued to hold out, but has said it would accept vaccines from Muslim countries such as Indonesia. – Guardian Unlimited Â