UN urges Nigeria to resume immunization after polio spreads to seventh country

With poliovirus now confirmed in a seventh previously polio-free country, the United Nations health agency called on Nigeria today to resume at once the immunization campaigns it suspended last August lest outbreaks of the paralyzing and sometimes fatal disease spread across west and central Africa.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said a case of poliomyelitis imported from Nigeria had been confirmed 200 kilometres north of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, which had not reported polio cases since July 2000.

The virus detected is linked to those circulating in northern Nigeria in 2003. This latest case follows the reporting of paralytic polio due to type 1 poliovirus from northern Nigeria spreading to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana and Togo. Collectively, those countries recorded a total of nearly two dozen cases of polio.

“It is critical that Nigeria immediately resume its polio immunization campaigns in the north, to boost population immunity and stop the spreading polio outbreak and the continuing risk it poses to children in countries across west and central Africa,” the Geneva-based WHO said.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, has more cases than any other nation. At a UN-hosted meeting in Geneva earlier this month the six remaining polio-endemic countries – Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan – pledged to relegate the disease to the history books within a year.

Adopting a plan for massive campaigns to immunize 250 million children, they declared that an additional $150 million was urgently needed to fill the remaining funding gap for activities during 2004 and 2005.