Polio doing the rounds again - 7 dead and 37 under investigation in Namibia

Jun 12 2006

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) three cases of polio have been confirmed in Namibia and another 37 cases are being investigated.

To date a total of seven people have died from what is suspected to have been polio.

The outbreak represents a huge setback to the developing nation which had prided itself on being free of the disease since 1996.

It seems the majority of cases are in people over 20 years old and WHO spokesperson Oliver Rosenbauer says the situation is odd because it is mainly adults who are being affected.

Angola too had been polio-free since 2001, but was re-infected last year by a virus from India and genetic sequencing has confirmed that the Namibian virus is consistent with an importation from Angola, of Indian origin.

Rosenbauer says such outbreaks are to be expected until the virus is cleared from the endemic countries.

Namibia is all set to vamp up its immunisation campaigns in an effort to stamp out the outbreak and the entire population of two million people will be vaccinated rather than just children, with the help of an international team.

Experts suspect the adults have been vulnerable to the disease because they were not immunized as children.

The WHO says the cases of sudden paralysis were mainly in the area of Windhoek where the first reported case was the sudden paralysis of a 39-year old man on May 8, which was later confirmed as polio.

The WHO had a deadline to meet its long-standing target of eradicating polio globally by the end of last year and that came unstuck after hard-line Islamic clerics in northern Nigeria led an immunization boycott in 2003.

The clerics claimed the polio vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot to render Nigeria's Muslims infertile or infect them with Aids.

A subsequent outbreak was thought to be the result of the Nigerian vaccine boycott and the disease then spread across Africa and into the Middle East.

Even though vaccination programs began again in Nigeria in July 2004 after local officials ended the 11-month boycott, the delay effectively set global eradication efforts back at least a year.

The WHO is optimistic that the disease will be eradicated by 2007.

The WHO says Polio is still endemic in Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, but has recently been stamped out in Egypt and Niger.

When WHO launched the $4-billion anti-polio campaign in 1988, the worldwide case count was more than 350,000 annually.

Polio is spread when people - mostly young children who are not vaccinated come into contact with the faeces of those with the virus, often through water.

The virus attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy and deformation and, in some cases, death.