Appearance of polio reported

Health officials in Botswana are on alert after the first case of polio in more than a decade was reported. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), a seven-year-old boy from the Ngami district in northwestern Botswana suffered the onset of paralysis on 8 February. "The polio case in Botswana underlines the magnitude of the risk posed to polio-free areas by the ongoing polio outbreaks in west and central Africa, and is compounded by the growing vulnerability of populations to polio globally, following the cessation of preventive polio immunisation campaigns in most polio-free countries in 2002/03," WHO said in a statement released on Wednesday. The authorities, together with WHO and the UN's Children's Fund, are currently preparing an emergency response to the threat of importing the disease, including heightened surveillance throughout the country and a nationwide immunisation campaign to ensure that any transmission of the polio virus is stopped rapidly. "It must be noted that routine immunisation in Botswana has been quite successful, with around 85 percent of children routinely immunised. The country also has a strong disease surveillance system, which means that now that they have detected polio, they are able to respond quickly and effectively. This will prevent polio from becoming endemic," Oliver Rosenbauer, a WHO spokesman in Geneva, Switzerland, told IRIN. He noted that neighbouring countries were being notified, and urged them to strengthen their polio surveillance and routine immunisation coverage. The polio virus is now endemic in only six countries, down from over 125 when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988. The six countries with indigenous wild polio virus are: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt.