Emergency vaccination starts following polio outbreak

Ethiopia has launched an emergency polio vaccination campaign amid new fears the disease could spread from neighbouring Sudan, the health ministry said on Monday. The government began targeting children last Thursday in six regions neighbouring Sudan after 19 cases emerged just 75 km from their common border. Ethiopia has been polio free for the last four years and hopes to be certified free of the virus in accordance with World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. Dr Tesfanesh Belay, head of the Family Health Care department at the ministry told IRIN the disease could easily travel across the border and jeopardise their health campaign. She said the new cases in Sudan were unexpected, as the country had remained polio free for the last three years. "If the threat is not reversed, the gains achieved will dissipate into thin air," she said. "There is free movement along these border areas, so it is very easy for the disease to travel." "We are afraid that we could import the disease," she continued. "The outbreak of the virus is very close to our border and because of the numbers affected, it makes it very difficult to control." She added that a vaccination campaign was the only option. "We cannot close an international border, so we have to conduct a polio vaccination," she said. Polio now circulates in no more than 20 countries, down from 30 in 1999 and 125 in 1988, when the campaign was launched. These are mainly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In these areas, national immunisation days and intensive house-to-house campaigns have been conducted to wipe out the virus. Some 300,000 children are to be targeted in the new campaign, according to the ministry. Less than half of children in Ethiopia are immunised against preventable diseases. Immunisation rates for polio are slightly higher at 60 percent. Poliomyelitis – the full scientific name for polio - is a highly infectious disease with no cure and is caused by a virus that mainly affects children under three years of age. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. The virus enters the body through the mouth and multiplies in the intestine. Initial symptoms are fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting and stiffness in the neck and pain in the limbs. One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, which is usually in the legs. More than 14 million children were vaccinated in Ethiopia in the last two years against the crippling virus. More than 550 million children across the world were vaccinated. The WHO, Rotary Club International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and UNICEF, spearhead the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.