WHO says polio under control as new cases reach 471

The number of confirmed polio cases recorded in Yemen this year has risen to 471, but following a crash immunization drive the outbreak has been brought under control, Hashim al-Zain, the World Health Organisation (WHO) representative in the country, told IRIN. Doctor al-Zain said on Wednesday that 23 more suspected cases of polio had been confirmed over the past three weeks. But he stressed that no new suspected cases of polio had been detected since mid-August and that following three emergency vaccination campaigns the outbreak had been brought under control. “The number of confirmed cases of polio, as of 5 October, was 471,” al-Zain said, noting that the last suspected case to be confirmed had been detected in mid-August. “It is a good achievement that we have managed to control the disease in around four months,” he added. Polio is a highly infectious viral disease which can rapidly paralyse the victim’s arms and legs. Young children are most vulnerable to catching the disease, which can cause limb paralysis in a matter of hours. The WHO declared Yemen free of polio in 1996 and child immunization in the country subsequently became less thorough, so when a new outbreak of the disease was confirmed in April this year it spread rapidly. The outbreak began in the Red Sea port of Hodeida and 45 percent of all polio cases detected since then have been in Hodeida and the surrounding district. Health officials believe that polio was reintroduced to Yemen by travelers from Africa, where the virus is still endemic in Nigeria, Niger and Egypt. By the end of May 179 cases of polio had been confirmed in Yemen, which had not recorded a single case for the previous six years. The caseload more than doubled to 426 in late August, but al-Zain said that since then the reporting of new cases had slowed to a trickle. The government of this mountainous and mainly desert nation of 20 million people responded to the outbreak by launching a series of emergency immunization campaigns in conjunction with the WHO and other international health organizations. These used vaccines specially designed to combat the “type one” strain of polio that has appeared in Yemen. Campaigns to immunize all children under the age of five with this vaccine were conducted at the end of May and again in August and September. At first, some parents were reluctant to allow their children to immunized, either because they believed the vaccine caused infertility or because they had been persuaded by local Islamic religious leaders that the droplets popped into the mouth were dangerous. However, al-Zain said resistance to immunization had virtually collapsed. Only a few isolated cases of refusal had been reported during the latest three-day vaccination campaign, which began on 27 September and aimed to reach four million children, he noted. Yemen has reported almost as many cases of polio this year as Nigeria, where there has been a resurgence of the disease following the emergence of strong resistance to immunization in the mainly Muslim north in 2003. The WHO has blamed the recent flare-up of polio in Nigeria for the re-appearance of the disease in eight African countries which had previously been declared polio-free. They include Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan which face Yemen across the Red Sea. But the outbreak in Yemen has been more serious than anywhere else. According to the WHO, this Middle Eastern country accounted for 36 percent of the 1,310 case of polio registered worldwide during the first nine months of this year. Its caseload of 471 is nearly equal to that of Nigeria, where 473 cases of polio have been recorded so far this year. The WHO-led Global Polio Eradication Initiative originally hoped to wipe out the disease worldwide by the end of 2004. However, Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the Geneva-based organization, said the problems experienced in Nigeria meant that it would be impossible to stamp out polio before late 2006 at the earliest. Technical experts would meet next week to analyse the current situation with a view to setting a new target date, he added. “What is clear already is that Nigeria will need another 12 months to finish so we cannot achieve global eradication before the end of 2005,” Rosenbauer said.