Five new polio cases detected in Sindh this year - health official

Five new cases of polio have been detected in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh this year, but health authorities are confident that a fresh round of a country-wide campaign to eradicate the illness, due to start in June, would help the province to become a polio-free zone by December. "We've detected five positive cases of polio," Dr Hussain Bux Memon, the director-general health services for Sindh, told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi. Apart from one case in Karachi, all the others were in central or rural Sindh, Memon added. The towns of Nawabshah and Jacobabad and the rural district area of Ghotki, where two cases had been detected, were being focused upon, he explained. While all the other cases were under control, the two cases at Ghotki in rural Sindh were worrisome because the patients had already received eight to 10 doses of the anti-polio vaccine, the health official said. The illness had resurfaced possibly because the patients had not been able to "develop immunity against the virus - there could be no other reason," he added. Health authorities were worried, Memon admitted, but insisted that they were trying their best. "We didn't get any positive cases last month. In the month of May, we have done a good job: we have improved the routine immunisation. We have improved the campaign. I'm optimistic that we will not be having more cases," he stressed, pointing to the department's avowed mission to make Sindh a polio-free zone by December this year. But, since the wild virus was already circulating, Memon said he thought it imperative that efforts to counter the spread of the illness focus on an improved immunisation campaign. "The only answer to the problem is that we improve our routine immunisation and our campaign," Memon emphasised. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had pinpointed Jacobabad and Ghotki as two areas that were continuing to cause problems, Dr Tony Mounts, a WHO medical officer, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "The cases in Nawabshah and Karachi aren't important epidemiologically because they're both imported from the NWFP [North West Frontier Province] and the virus, we know from the genetic analysis, has come from the NWFP to Nawabshah and Karachi. So there's no evidence at all that the virus is actually circulating in those two cities," Mounts explained. However, the cases detected in northern Sindh, in Ghotki, were different and directly related to cases discovered last year in the rural town of Larkana, he added. "So that means that the virus has been persisting in northern Sindh but persisting to a very low level; it also means that it is very localised," Mounts maintained. Routine immunisations were already "pretty good," Mounts explained, but they "wouldn't help." If you had a perfect routine [immunisation] programme in Pakistan, it would not be enough to stop polio transmission," he emphasised. Pakistan is one of six remaining polio endemic countries, along with India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria and Niger. But latest figures showed Asian and north African regions had recorded unprecedented low levels of polio, reporting only 21 cases combined, compared to 94 at the same time last year, according to a recent UNICEF press statement. "With the all-time low levels of polio in Egypt, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, four of the six remaining endemic countries are on track to meet the end-2004 target for stopping polio - a date set by endemic polio country governments on 15 January at the signing of the 'Geneva Declaration for the Eradication of Poliomyelitis'," the statement added. Pakistan was elected to head WHO's World Health Assembly, an annual congregation of health ministers from a majority of the world's countries earlier this month. The UNICEF press statement quoted Mohammed Nasir Khan, the Pakistani health minister, as telling the assembly that President Pervez Musharraf had himself endorsed an "accelerated mop-up strategy." "We will finish the job this year," Khan was quoted as saying. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is spearheaded by WHO, Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and UNICEF. The polio virus is now endemic in only six countries, down from over 125 when the initiative was launched in 1988.