Six cases of polio in Angola bring on new immunization campaigns, UN says

United Nations agencies are carrying out a series of immunization campaigns in Angola, after the West African country recently reported six cases of polio despite having been polio-free since 2001.

To contain the new outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO), together with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), European and North American donors and other partners, is carrying out a series of immunization campaigns using a combination of monovalent oral polio vaccine (mOPV) in the immediate area of the cases and trivalent oral polio vaccine in the rest of the country.

WHO spearheaded an earlier campaign late last month. Genetic sequencing of the type-1 wild poliovirus in the first case, confirmed in late June, showed that it originated in India and other scientific evidence suggested a recent importation, but the affected family had never travelled out of the country.

Because the two recent most cases were found near Angola’s borders with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia, WHO has been discussing with the Congolese authorities the possibility of immunizing people in the DRC-Angolan border region.

The wave of vaccinations is part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which hopes to relegate the disease to the history books by the end of the year. The poliovirus is now endemic in only six countries – Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt – down from over 125 when the Initiative was launched in 1988.

Twelve previously polio-free countries had fresh infections after immunizations were suspended in northern Nigeria last year because of local concerns about the health effects of the vaccine initially used. The authorities in the area later switched to a polio vaccine made in a Muslim country.

One of the re-infected countries is Botswana, which lies only 60 kilometres from Angola’s southern border.