Campaign targets double threat of polio and malaria

Niger launched a new offensive against two health scourges on Tuesday, vowing to protect its children from polio and malaria. “The government is committed to continuing to fight unfailingly against these two enemies of public health,” said Health Minister Ari Ibrahim to an audience which included the nation’s president in the town of Say, about 50 km south of capital Niamey. Over five days, more than 10,000 health workers will go door-to-door in Niger’s communities, big and small, to vaccinate children under the age of five against polio. At the same time, they will provide each child’s mother with an insecticide treated bed-net -- more than two million of them when all is said and done -- to help protect against mosquito-transmitted malaria. With 850,000 reported cases in an average year out of a population of slightly more than 13 million, malaria is the most common illness in Niger. In 2004, it killed over 2,000 Nigeriens, most of them infants. When prevalence peaks during the August rains, malaria claims the lives of an estimated 17 people every day in the West African country. “The infection and mortality rates associated with malaria are partly due to people’s jaded attitude towards the disease as well as their unwillingness or inability to take the steps necessary to prevent or treat it,” said Issa Halilou, a doctor in Niamey. In addition to its human toll, malaria costs Niger, rated as the world’s poorest country in the UN’s latest Human Development Index, close to 14 billion CFA francs (about US $25 million) annually in medical bills and days of lost productivity. As for polio, once a worldwide pandemic, it has now been eradicated from much of the globe but not from Niger. Despite 23 national vaccination campaigns against the crippling disease, which is untreatable once contracted but can be avoided through a single childhood vaccination, polio remains endemic. Polio is linked to poverty and is spread through the consumption of food or water contaminated with faeces Niger's battle against polio is hindered by a shortage of doctors - there is only one for every 32,000 people. And for 10 months until late 2004, religious leaders across the border in northern Nigeria banned polio vaccines, declaiming them as tools of Western domination. The result was a sharp spike in the number of polio cases in the region. But with only eight cases reported in Niger this year, down from 40 in 2003, the trend seems to be moving in the right direction. UNICEF’s Aboudou Karimou Adjibade, also attending in Say, voiced optimism that this double campaign will help the country reach the objectives set out by the UN in 2000 in order to eradicate the most extreme problems linked to global poverty. “These two campaigns mark a sure and concerted step towards our ultimate ambition, the achievement of the Millenium Development Goals.”