Major polio campaign aims to vaccinate five million

The Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) on Monday launched a three-day child vaccination campaign against polio by deploying 40,000 volunteers across the country. “This nationwide campaign will cover every district in the country except very few areas which are not accessible due to heavy snow,” Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for the MoPH, told IRIN in the Afghan capital, Kabul . Afghanistan is among seven countries in the world along with Nigeria, India, Egypt, Niger, Somali and Pakistan that remain polio-endemic. The country, however is on the way to being polio free, having recorded just eight cases last year. MoPH officials said they were expecting to eradicate the virus by the end of 2004. “We were committed to ending polio in 2003, but unfortunately we are among seven countries that failed to reach this goal,” Fahim maintained. Conducted with the support of the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN's World Health Organisation (WHO), teams of vaccinators and monitors are travelling from village to village, house to house across the country to reach five million children ranging from newborns to five-year-olds. “Vaccinators are mostly women, particularly in urban areas which makes it easier to access every child,” Fahim said. Six million children were vaccinated during four campaigns in 2003. “There were eight reported cases of polio in 2003, compared to 10 the year before and 11 the year before that,” Chulho Hyun, a UNICEF spokesperson, said. UNICEF staff said health officials in Afghanistan had made significant strides in recent years toward the global goal of interrupting the transmission of wild poliovirus by the end of 2004, which would lead to the country being certified polio-free by 2005. “Importation of polio will remain a risk until the debilitating disease is eradicated everywhere, and that is why Afghanistan’s ministry of health should be commended for treating the issue of polio as an urgent public health threat,” said Sharad Sapra, UNICEF representative in Afghanistan.