Funding shortfall could endanger drive to wipe out polio

The massive simultaneous polio vaccination campaign across West and Central Africa this year is starting to bear fruit, but a US$ 35 million funding shortfall could endanger next year's drive to wipe out the crippling disease, a senior official from World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. A ban on polio immunisation in the northern Nigerian state of Kano helped the virus spread across the wider region this year, derailing international health experts' plans to eradicate it by the end of this year. Now the threat is financial. "There is a funding shortfall of US$ 35 million and if we do not get the money by the end of January, we may have to cut back on the campaign in 2005, which would be a tragedy," Bruce Aylward, the WHO's polio coordinator, told IRIN by phone from Geneva on Tuesday. Polio causes paralysis and can leave victims consigned to wheelchairs or crutches. The second five-day round of a synchronised campaign to immunise 80 million children under five from the disease will get underway in most of the 24 countries from Thursday. Further rounds are to follow throughout 2005. Aylward said the first round, which took place in October, had gone well, with more than 90 percent of all children under five immunised in countries such as Benin and Burkina Faso. Nigeria was the main worry during the October campaigns, conflicts in Sudan and Cote d'Ivoire meant they could be the trouble spots this time around. "Concern in October was for Nigeria where they had stopped immunizing, but it all went well," Aylward said. "Now, with the conflicts and instability in Cote d'Ivoire and Sudan, there is the concern that we may have to delay the campaign because of the deteriorating situation," Aylward said. He noted that the number of cases had dropped in most countries but new cases were still cropping up in Cote d'Ivoire and Sudan. WHO figures show 918 new polio cases have been registered so far this year in 16 countries compared to 520 cases in 11 countries at the same point a year ago. More than two-thirds of the cases -- 678 -- are in Nigeria, where the mainly Muslim state of Kano, last year outlawed polio vaccines for 10 months after radical Islamic preachers branded them part of a Western, Christian plot to reduce Nigeria's Muslim population by making them infertile and infecting them with cancer. Polio then spread to children in 12 west and central African countries previously declared polio-free and experts warned the region was on the brink of the largest epidemic in recent years.