90 percent polio immunisation achieved, official says

Rwanda has achieved more than 90 percent coverage of children targeted in a second round polio and measles vaccinations campaign, PANA reported a Ministry of Health official as saying.

The head of the ministry's Social Mobilisation and Logistics Department, Anicet Rwasangabo, said on Saturday that the effort which started in September targeted 1.4 million children for polio vaccination and 1.2 million others for measles, representing 16.5 percent and 14.3 percent respectively, PANA quoted him as saying. He attributed the success to the government's lifting of "barriers" in place during the first campaign, PANA added. He said there had been a 100 percent turnout for vaccination in Byumba and Kibungo in the northeast and east of the country.

WHO's inter-country epidemiologist, Dr. Rudi Eggers, told IRIN in Nairobi on Monday that polio was last reported in Rwanda in 1993. He said the continued vaccination campaigns were necessary "to prevent importation" of the virus from countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. Revaccinations, he said, deprived the virus of its host. He said that WHO was now undertaking acute flaccid paralysis surveys for east Africa and Rwanda, where it checks for the presence of polio-like symptoms among children.