Two new polio cases reported

Two children have contracted polio in Ethiopia, the first time the virus has been reported in the country in four years, a ministry of health official said on Monday. Almaz Gebre Senbet, a polio expert, said that a boy and a girl living close to the Sudanese border had contracted the crippling virus. The new outbreak occurred as the UN launched a mass polio immunisation campaign that began on Friday across Africa, targeting 100 million children. To be certified polio free, Ethiopia must have no cases of the virus for three years. A target date of 2005 has been set for the global eradication of the disease. “It is extremely unfortunate because we were just on the verge of being declared polio free,” Bjorn Ljungqvist, the head of the UN Children’s Fund told IRIN. “This has put us back several years and now means we have to start full-scale immunisations again.” The new cases are another sign that the epidemic is spreading across Africa. Ethiopia is the 14th African country, previously polio free, to record new cases. It is believed the new epidemic originated in northern Nigeria 18 months ago. Ethiopia had itself launched a massive vaccination campaign along its border region with Sudan late last year, fearing it would spread across the frontier. “We have two cases of wild polio virus,” Almaz said. “It is in a boy and a girl who are Ethiopians. We had been expecting this because the border with Sudan is open. For four years we have not had a case.” She said that a medical team had left Addis Ababa on Thursday for the border region to investigate the situation. “This is serious for us, but the cases are imported from Sudan,” she added. “We must strengthen our surveillance in all border areas.” Poliomyelitis - 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.