Polio vaccination campaign starts in SPLM/A areas

The second leg of the nationwide polio vaccination campaign started on Monday in Upper Nile and Bahr el-Ghazal states, which are controlled by the southern-based Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), UN officials said. The campaign, which is scheduled to end on Thursday, targets almost a million children under the age of five. It follows an emergency campaign in December that targeted 500,000 children in the north where polio cases had been confirmed. "The major difference with polio vaccination campaigns in northern Sudan is that there is little to no routine immunisation in the south," Paula Gleeson, polio officer for the World Health Organization (WHO), told IRIN on Monday. "This campaign is the only chance to get some control over the polio outbreak," she added. According to Gleeson, "more than 2 million children will be targeted in SPLM/A-controlled areas when a full campaign gets underway across south Sudan from 25 to 28 February". The WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Khartoum announced on Sunday that the preliminary results of the three-day polio vaccination campaign in the government-controlled areas had indicated that the first leg reached more than five million children. The northern campaign was jointly organised and conducted in 23 states by the Sudanese Ministry of Health, WHO and UNICEF, as well as partner national and international NGOs. Of the 112 cases of polio that had been identified in Sudan by the first week of January, four were in SPLM/A-controlled areas, WHO said. The campaign was the first of a series of National Immunisation Days planned throughout Sudan this year in response to the polio outbreak. Jan Pronk, the special representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan, welcomed the initial results of the campaign. "I am pleased that all Sudanese parties, including in Darfur, have responded favorably to the appeal I made to observe days of tranquility during the campaign," he said in a statement. "I am satisfied that they all kept their promises," he added. "I would like to thank them for their cooperation and call on them to respect fully the ceasefire agreements in order to allow for the completion of the campaign." Poliomyelitis is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus that affects mainly children under the age of three. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. According to UNICEF, southern Sudan is one of the lowest ranked regions in the world in many key indicators of women and children's wellbeing. Malnutrition rates are high and primary school completion and immunisation and antenatal care, dismal. A report published in June 2004 by UNICEF in collaboration with the New Sudan Centre for Statistics and Evaluation described the state of southern Sudan's women and children as "shocking". Infant mortality was very high and one out of every four newborns died before reaching the age of five. Limited access to health services was highlighted by the fact that there was one medical doctor for every 100,000 persons in SPLM/A-controlled southern Sudan, the report noted. It suggested that only one out of every 50 children finished primary school. With a population of about 7.5 million, only 500 girls and 2,000 boys finished primary school each year.