Polio has returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the first time in six years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced on Friday.
WHO spokesperson Fadela Chaib told reporters that a two-and-a-half year old girl had been paralysed by a strain of the polio virus that had been carried from India via Angola.
The agency was planning a vaccination campaign in the child’s home-region near the Angolan border to stifle the spread of a virus, she said.
Polio has been practically eradicated from the face of the globe. There were fewer than 1 900 cases of the disease around the world in 2005, compared with 350 000 in 1988.
It is still endemic in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Since 2003, WHO-spearheaded efforts to eradicate the crippling and potentially lethal disease have been set back as it has spilled from the endemic areas — particularly Nigeria — into a total of 23 other countries.
That has forced the WHO to organise new vaccination campaigns, which have been largely successful but which have siphoned resources that are sorely needed to wipe out the reservoirs of polio.
Besides the DRC, so-called imported polio is also currently present in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nepal, Somalia and Yemen.
The last previous case in the DRC was in 2000.
Chaib said that experts are optimistic that they can tackle the disease there again, because the girl lives in the Bas Congo region, which is a haven of relative calm and has better health facilities than other parts of the strife-torn Central African nation. — AFP
