WHO: Polio worries for Africa
2004-08-24 12:49
Geneva - Polio has spread to new countries in Africa, threatening to become a major epidemic in the region and further setting back global attempts to wipe out the potentially crippling disease, the United Nations health agency said on Tuesday.
Geneva - Polio has spread to new countries in Africa, threatening to become a major epidemic in the region and further setting back global attempts to wipe out the potentially crippling disease, the United Nations health agency said on Tuesday.
"Epidemiologists from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative today confirmed the reinfection of Guinea and Mali, as well as three new cases in the Darfur region of Sudan," said a statement from the World Health Organisation and other agencies.
The polio outbreak - which has spread from northern Nigeria - could turn into a major epidemic across central and western Africa as the polio "high season" begins in September, the agency said.
Affects young children
The disease has now appeared in about a dozen African countries, after being limited to only two at the beginning of last year.
WHO had been hoping to eradicate polio by January 1 after a 15-year global immunisation campaign, but efforts in Africa stalled in the face of resistance in northern Nigeria's heavily Muslim Kano state.
The immunisation programme resumed in Kano two weeks ago, but the disease had already spread to Guinea and Mali, WHO said.
Both Guinea, which has one confirmed new case, and Mali, with two cases, had reported their last polio infection in 1999, the statement said.
Polio is a waterborne disease that usually infects young children, attacking the nervous system and causing paralysis, deformation and sometimes death.
- AP