Campaign to thwart polio outbreak expected to vaccinate 85 million African children

11 March 2010 [MediaGlobal]:The first stage of a massive campaign to stop the spread of a polio epidemic took place in West and Central Africa this week. Four hundred thousand volunteers and health workers traveled door to door with the goal of administering the oral polio vaccine (OPV) to children under five. Sixteen countries will be receiving vaccines in the campaign, with three more to participate after their respective elections or political transitions have occurred.

The Global Polio Eradiation Initiative (GPEI) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) are funding this campaign, which is benefiting from $30 million in additional essential funds from Rotary International, a GPEI partner. “Rotary’s flagship program is polio eradication,” Carol Pandak, Manager of Rotary’s PolioPlus Program told MediaGlobal. “Stopping polio in Africa is key to eradicating the disease worldwide.”

Polio, a disease with no known cure, has proven to be preventable in children by administering multiple doses of OPV. Thanks to vaccination programs over the past few decades, the illness, which may cause meningitis and paralysis, is only endemic in four countries. The current outbreak of polio in Africa began in one of these countries, Nigeria, and spread to surrounding nations in 2008. A previous attempt to eliminate the epidemic in 2009 proved unsuccessful at stopping the virus because not enough children were vaccinated.

“Reaching every child under five, some 85 million of them, during these historic campaigns is the only way we will ensure immunity across these 19 countries to help create a polio-free Africa,” Pandak said, “Where children are missed, poliovirus will continue to spread among unimmunized populations, just as it has during the past year.”

The vaccination campaign will be repeated in April in the same 19 countries, and an extra dose will be provided to children in six countries with recent polio cases in between the first and second parts of the campaign as part of a new “short interval additional dose strategy.”