Anti-polio campaign targets 16 million children

Ethiopia launched an ambitious plan to arrest the spread of polio in the country on Tuesday hoping to immunise at least 16 million children by the end of the year. More than 100,000 volunteers and health workers will move door-to-door across the country to administer the oral polio vaccine to all children under five. The campaign was launched as health experts confirmed 18 cases of polio in three states - Tigray, Amhara and Oromia. Ethiopia was on the verge of being declared officially polio-free at the end of last year. "We were on the verge of eliminating polio from Ethiopia when the virus marched back into Ethiopia from the Sudan," Bjorn Ljungqvist, UNICEF head in Ethiopia told IRIN. "[Polio] is now following trade and transport routes into the interior of the country unraveling years of successful polio eradication activities attained at great effort and expense," he added. A country needs three consecutive years without a single polio case to be certified polio free. Prior to cross-border transmission from Sudan earlier this year, the last confirmed case of polio in Ethiopia was in January 2001. "Ethiopia has no alternative but to repeat the Herculean task of defeating the virus by going door-to-door across this vast country to immunize every single child under five," said Ljungqvist.