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Egypt declared polio-free
01/02/2006 23:07 - (SA)
Cairo - The United Nations Children's Fund on Wednesday declared that Egypt was free from polio, a disease that had plagued the country since ancient times.
The announcement by Unicef and partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative came just more than a year after the last positive sample of polio was detected in Egypt and almost two years after the last case of polio was reported.
Erma Manoncourt of Unicef in Egypt said: "Polio eradication has been a national endeavour in this country.
"Egypt has every reason to be proud of its contribution to the global campaign against this disease."
The endemic polio had been detected among children living along the Nile valley in the pharonic times, according to archaeological evidence.
Eradication of polio
By 1988 after the global eradication effort began, Egypt was reporting several thousand cases every year.
According the Unicef, the eradication of polio from Egypt was the outcome of efforts led by tens of thousands of health workers and vaccinators working under a broad alliance of national and international organisations.
Egypt had been among the last handful of countries around the world with the virus. Only four countries in the world now have endemic polio: Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Unicef said Egypt's ministry of health and population had implemented immunisation campaigns to vaccinate children aged five or under, carried out by teams that went door-to-door across the country.
By the end of the 1980s, about 11 million children had had to receive vaccination drops several times a year for many years.
Egypt had been receiving technical and financial support from various organisations, including the World Health Organisation, Unicef, Rotary International, the US Agency for International Development and the Japanese government.
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