Govt launches crash polio campaign as outbreak confirmed

Namibia is to launch a national polio vaccination campaign after the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed an outbreak of the highly contagious virus this week.

So far seven deaths and 39 cases of the wild polio have been reported, Kalumbi Shangula, permanent secretary in the ministry of health, said on Thursday. The first case was reported on 7 May in Aranos, a small town south of the capital, Windhoek. The last polio outbreak in Namibia occurred in 1996.

"The polio strain confirmed is the Virus Type 1," said Shangula. "It is not indigenous, but an imported virus strain of the Indian type, which was isolated in Angola last year. It is not clear whether this virus type came to Namibia from India or from Angola; investigations are still continuing."

The government is to immunise close to two million people at a cost of US$4.5 million, with supplies of the vaccine airlifted to the country by next week. "The mass vaccination campaign will start on 21 June, followed by two more rounds in July and August, and everybody must be vaccinated," said Shangula.

Vaccination programmes are normally limited to children younger than five years but, unusually, the current outbreak has affected mostly adults.

Pharmacies and clinics sold out of vaccines in just a few days after a rush by anxious Namibians looking to be immunised privately. "All our stocks are gone, we must wait for supplies from South Africa to restock," a pharmacist in Windhoek told IRIN.

But according to the ministry of health, people who chose to be immunised privately were given the "wrong" vaccine. "They were immunised with trivulent Oral Polio Vaccine, and this must be stopped immediately," said Shangula.

This vaccine is meant only for children aged under five, whereas the government is importing monovalent oral polio vaccine type 1 for the three national immunisation days it has planned.

Namibia began routine immunisation against polio in 1990, but coverage varies by region from 60 percent to 80 percent. WHO said the current outbreak was likely to be traced to people who had not been immunised as children.

Angola, Namibia's northern neighbour, has been polio-free since 2001, until it was re-infected last year by a virus from India.

WHO spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer explained that only one in 200 carriers of the virus show the symptoms, "so it very difficult to attribute the outbreak to any particular individual - it could have been spread by a Namibian who had visited Angola during the outbreak, or an Angolan in Namibia, or someone else who visited both countries."

Polio is a paralytic virus spread by human-to-human contact through fecally contaminated water or food. The incubation period ranges from three to 35 days.