Polio vaccination campaign complicated by war

It will be clear in about two weeks whether an ambitious government-led polio vaccination campaign, targeting about 2.3 million Angolan children, has been successful.

Many of the children targeted in the three-day campaign, which ended on Sunday, were from areas which were previously inaccessible because of the country's civil war.

World Health Organisation (WHO) Team Leader Dr Rui Gama Vaz told IRIN on Monday that preliminary results from Luanda province were positive, but that results from other provinces were still being collected.

At the launch of the campaign on Friday, Vaz and Dr Fatima Valente, who manages the government's vaccination programmes, said quartering areas - in which UNITA soldiers and their families are gathering in preparation for demobilisation - would be priority targets.

Valente said the 40 municipalities in which immunisation would take place had either recently received an influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs), had recorded suspected cases of polio in the past year, or had not been accessible before because of the war.

While Valente said on Monday that some children in quartering areas had been reached, Vaz said that to his knowledge field workers were unable to secure access to the quartering areas. The success of the campaign in these areas would only be clear, Vaz said, once information from all provinces was collated.

One case of polio was confirmed in Angola last year, while there were 149 suspected cases. Ten children suspected to have contracted the disease last year remained paralysed, Valente said.

Polio causes permanent paralysis.