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Mail & Guardian

Poliovirus

latest news & developments
A child gets vaccinated for polio by a community health worker during a UNICEF-supported measles and polio immunisation campaign in Ifo, one of the three main refugee camps near the town of Dadaab in the north-eastern province of Kenya on August 2, 2011. The campaign aimed at immunising 250,000 children under the age of five inside the refugee camps in the next several weeks. On this day alone, the goal was to immunise over 5,000 children within Ifo camp. The new arrivals, who escaped instability and drought from Somalia, were particularly vulnerable to infections as they arrived weakened and usually having never been immunised before.
AFRICA

Good news: Africa is declared free of wild polio

The global polio eradication initiative, involving governments, the World Health Organisation and other institutions, was launched in 1988. It took three decades of immunising…

  • Simon Allison
3 min read