Polio alert following reported cases in Sudan

The Ugandan health ministry warned on Monday that children in the northern districts could face the risk of contracting polio following a reported outbreak of the disease in neighbouring Sudan. It urged parents to take children who had not completed their immunisation schedules for vaccination. "The ministry has decided to conduct two rounds of supplementary polio vaccinations, targeting children up to 5 years, in the districts bordering Sudan," Paul Kagwa, a spokesman for the ministry, told IRIN. "We fear that because of cross border movement, these districts will be at high risk of getting infections. "We also want mothers to take children with signs of weakness to any nearest health centre," he added. "Children below five years will also be given other vaccines to protect them from measles, pneumonia and meningitis." The Ugandan districts with close proximity to Sudan include Adjumani, Apac, Kitgum, Kotido, Lira, Masindi, Moyo, Moroto, Nakapiripirit and Pader. The ministry, in a statement, expressed fear that several million children in the country were at risk of contracting the disease because they did not complete their routine immunisation, following the confirmation of 112 cases in 13 Sudanese states since November. "The Ministry of Health has been monitoring the progress of the epidemic and would like to notify the public that all children who did not complete their routine immunisation series are at risk of acquiring the polio virus," the statement noted. The statement said Uganda had not registered any case of polio since 1997, which it said was attributable to the "high quality polio campaigns and a routine immunisation programme". However, it added, some "2.8 million children had over the last four years not completed their routine immunisation schedule. This puts Uganda at a high risk of importing polio virus from the polio-infected countries like Sudan, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon, Benin, Central African Republic and Botswana." A campaign to immunise millions of children against polio in Sudan started last week, as part of a nationwide exercise that, apart from targeting northern Sudan and the Darfur states, also started in the south on Monday. "The campaign is targeting 5.9 million children under the age of five across Sudan," Florence Kimanzi, assistant communication officer of UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN. Helped by some 40,000 volunteers, the UN World Health Organization, UNICEF, various NGOs and the Sudanese health ministry plan to vaccinate every child under the age of five, across Africa's largest country. Two further doses of the polio vaccine will then be administered at six-week intervals in February and April. Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus that affects mainly children under three years of age. It invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours.