WHO undertakes emergency polio immunisation

An emergency 10-day polio immunisation campaign is due to start on Friday in Somalia after the UN World Health Organization (WHO) warned the country could be reinfected with the disease from the nearby countries of Ethiopia and Yemen. "The outbreaks of polio in Ethiopia and Yemen, coupled with large population movements between Somalia and its neighbours, have put Somali children at risk of polio," David Heymann, a representative for polio eradication at WHO in Geneva, said. Ethiopia and Yemen are the latest two of 16 previously polio-free countries that have been reinfected due to an ongoing outbreak in west and central Africa, WHO and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in a joint statement on Thursday. Somalia has been polio-free since October 2002, they said. "The outbreaks in Ethiopia and Yemen have already paralysed 230 children and have infected as many as 40,000 with the disease," he added. The WHO representative for Somalia, Ibrahim Betelmal, said it "is crucial that all efforts are made to ensure that the polio virus is not allowed to reverse the gains made so far in Somalia". In addition to Ethiopia and Yemen, Betelmal said the disease had also broken out in Sudan - where 152 children have been paralysed over the past 12 months - as further evidence of the speed at which the disease could reinfect a country. Friday's immunisation campaign would be an emergency preventive measure to rapidly boost children's immunity to polio. Supported by WHO and UNICEF, tens of thousands of volunteers, health workers and parents, as well as community, religious and traditional leaders, would move from house-to-house and village-to-village across the country to hand-deliver the polio vaccine to every child under age five. The immunisation would be carried out on Friday and Saturday in the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland; on 18-20 June in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland; and from 24-26 June in the south and central areas of the country. According to WHO, vaccinators would use the recently developed monovalent oral polio vaccine type 1 (mOPV1), which has been known to boost children's immunity more rapidly than the commonly used trivalent oral polio vaccine. Organisers of the immunisation campaign have urged all members of the public to participate in the immunisation programme to ensure that all children benefit. More polio-immunisation campaigns would be held in July, August and September to confirm that all children had received sufficient doses of the vaccine and are adequately protected from the disease. UNICEF Somalia representative Jesper Morch appealed for even more support for the polio-eradication effort. "Because of the risk of the reinfection of Somalia and other polio-free countries, it is more urgent than ever to fill a $50 million [US] dollars global-funding gap by July," he said. Of this figure, nearly $2 million was needed for Somalia to continue its immunisation initiatives in the second half of 2005. "Failure to urgently meet these funding needs will compromise immunisation activities and threaten the polio-eradication effort, not only in Somalia but also worldwide," Morch said. The 16 previously polio-free countries suffering importations of the polio virus as a result of the 2003-2005 outbreaks in west and central Africa are Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Togo and Yemen.