Nigeria, others to vaccinate 111m children against polio

ACROSS Africa, over 111.1 million children below the age of five will be vaccinated within four days through a massive unifying West and Central African campaign.

Nigeria, the only polio-endemic country in Africa, aims to get two drops of the oral vaccine into the mouths of 57.7 million children while 19 other countries, which are at risk of re-infection, are stepping up efforts to reach nearly 53.3 million children.

The risk of importation of polio virus in West Africa persists given the endemic nature of transmission in Nigeria; the sub-optimal population immunity across the sub-region; the intensive cross-border population movements and the resurgence of poliovirus Type 3 in 2011 in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali and Niger.

This decisive phase including health ministries, United Nations (UN) agencies, Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, will be a door-to-door and hut-to-hut exercise vaccination campaign against polio in 20 African countries starting today (March 23).

Regional Director for West and Central Africa, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), David Gressly, said: “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 paralysed by this disease”.

While Nigeria will conduct its round from March 31 to April 3 due to operational reasons, the campaign will be conducted from March 23 to 26 in Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic, Niger, Cameroun, Benin Republic, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.

Executive Director, National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), Dr. Ado Muhammad, had earlier confirmed Nigeria’s participation in the gigantic campaign to reduce the risk and consequences of importation of poliovirus and to further boost population immunity levels.

Regional Director for Africa, World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr. Luis Sambo, said: “The upcoming campaign in West and Central Africa will aim to cover all children, immunised or not, in order to boost their protection levels and deprive the virus of the fertile seedbed on which it depends for survival.

“This exercise should bring us closer to reaching our goal of interrupting wild poliovirus transmission in our region in 2012”, Sambo said.