A polio vaccination campaign is to target 111 million children in 20 African countries
DAKAR (AlertNet) – U.N. agencies and their local partners are starting a massive vaccination campaign this week in a bid to stop polio from spreading in West and Central Africa, the agencies said in a joint statement.
Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus which invades the nervous system. It can lead to total paralysis in a matter of hours, and can be fatal.
The vaccination campaign will target 111 million children under the age of five in 20 countries.
“Either we succeed in eradicating polio today or this initiative will falter tomorrow and polio will explode. We will then see millions of children being paralyzed by this disease”, said David Gressly, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) regional director for West and Central Africa.
Experts say the best way to fight the disease is by immunising as many children as possible.
But poverty, inadequate health education and lack of access to healthcare mean children do not receive routine vaccines which would normally protect them and prevent vast, cross-border outbreaks of diseases like polio in West and Central Africa.
“The upcoming campaign … will aim to cover all children, immunized or not, in order to boost their protection levels and deprive the virus of the fertile seedbed on which it depends for survival,” Luis Sambo, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) regional director for Africa, said in a statement.
For polio to be eradicated, vaccination coverage has to be maintained at more than 90 percent for several years, experts say.
Only five countries in the region have attained or maintained this since 1998, according to a WHO assessment conducted in February.
U.N. agencies in the region hope to see more progress in Nigeria which is the only country in Africa where polio is endemic.
Nigerian authorities want to immunize 57.7 million children. The country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, inaugurated a Presidential Task Force to deal with the polio emergency and pledged $30 million per year for the next two years for polio eradication activities.
The campaign will run from March 23 to 26 March in Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Niger, Cameroon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. Nigeria will conduct its round from March 31 to April 3.
“This exercise should bring us closer to reaching our goal of interrupting wild polio virus transmission in our region in 2012,” Sambo said.
The effort is backed by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative which includes national governments, WHO, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF, and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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