Global perspective Human stories

With polio cluster in formerly virus-free Yemen, UN warns of risks of spread

With polio cluster in formerly virus-free Yemen, UN warns of risks of spread

The crippling effects of polio
Helping Yemen fight the first outbreak of polio in the Arabian Peninsula country in nine years, the United Nations health agency is warning that the risk of importation of the disease that once paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children worldwide each year remains as long as the virus exists anywhere on the planet.

Helping Yemen fight the first outbreak of polio in the Arabian Peninsula country in nine years, the United Nations health agency is warning that the risk of importation of the disease that once paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children worldwide each year remains as long as the virus exists anywhere on the planet.

The World Health Organization (WHO) urged all countries to maintain and strengthen surveillance and high population immunity against acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) in children, following the discovery of a cluster of four cases in Yemen.

WHO is working with the Yemeni Health Ministry to ensure that surveillance throughout the country is sensitized so that no transmission of wild poliovirus is missed. Additionally, health ministries of neighbouring countries have been informed.

In February WHO reported that three children had carried the virus into Saudi Arabia across land from West Africa and through Sudan. It warned then that the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca was one way the disease could spread further.

Polio began to spread again from the only six remaining endemic countries – Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan – when various Nigerian states suspended immunization in 2003 over concerns by public figures about the safety of the vaccine, including rumours that it was contaminated by the HIV virus or could sterilize young girls. The suspension was later lifted but not before the disease re-infected 10 other previously polio-free African countries.

The latest cases were reported in south-west Yemen in Hudeida governorate, and two teams of WHO and Yemeni Health Ministry experts, including epidemiologists and paediatricians, were sent there last week to further investigate.

Yemen conducted a nationwide immunization campaign from 13-15 April, to immunize all the country’s 4.5 million children under the age of five years, and WHO is working with the Health Ministry to plan for further intensive house-to-house immunization in the immediate vicinity of the cases.

Planning for the next nationwide immunization campaign in the second half of May is being intensified and a potential third campaign in June is under discussion, WHO said. Additional technical support is being provided for the continuing investigation and for the immunization rounds.