Bellamy to visit polio eradication campaign

Executive Director of UNICEF Carol Bellamy will visit the DRC and Angola from 8-13 August for the second round of a multi-national polio immunisation campaign targeting some 16 million children in DRC, Angola, Republic of Congo and Gabon, UNICEF announced Friday. Bellamy will observe immunisation efforts in displaced persons camps and remote areas in support of the recent call of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for all warring factions in central Africa to support the immunisation campaign and allow access to all children.

The global campaign to eradicate polio is in its final stages. By 2005, UNICEF and its partners, which include Rotary International, WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) plan to make polio the second disease to be eradicated, after smallpox in 1977. DRC and Angola are two of a few remaining countries where polio is still endemic and where ongoing conflict has hindered immunisation. “The global eradication effort will only succeed once polio is eliminated from such reservoirs,” the UNICEF statement noted.