HEALTH: Campaign Puts Polio on Verge of Eradication

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Apr 5 2001 (IPS) - In war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, the guns fell silent last year for periods ranging from five days to a week on three occasions.

What prompted these temporary cease-fires by the rebel groups and government forces was to enable the children living in the conflict zones to benefit from “Days of Tranquillity” during which local health workers fanned out to mud huts, hamlets and refugee camps to immunise children against polio.

Such immunisation efforts in the war zones were part of an intense drive during last year’s global polio eradication campaign, which resulted in a record 550 million children under five years being immunised in 82 countries. In war-torn DRC, for instance, nine million children received the few drops of the vaccine required to help them develop immunity to this crippling disease that attacks the central nervous system.

The achievements of this intense campaign have convinced the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) to declare that the world is on the verge of being polio-free. By 2005, the group says, polio will have gone the way of small pox, which in 1979, became the first disease to have been eradicated.

“In 2000, there were no more than 3,500 cases of polio reported worldwide, a 99 percent decrease from the 350,000 annual cases estimated in 1988 when the Initiative was launched,” the GPEI revealed this week.

“In just 12 months the number of polio cases has been halved from 7,141 in 1999,” added the GPEI, which is a partnership that includes the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and Rotary International.

For Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO’s director-general, the latest figures released by the GPEI mean that “victory over the polio virus is within sight”.

“It reflects what a driving force the global partnership has been to stamp out this disease,” adds Mohammed Jalloh, a UNICEF spokesman.

Nevertheless, both the WHO and UNICEF have been quick to point out that the remaining one percent of polio cases can pose the “greatest challenge”, particularly since some of the children in need of the vaccine live in war zones.

“The key now is urgently accessing and vaccinating the children we haven’t been able to reach because of war, isolation and lack of infrastructure,” said Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, in a press release. “It’s essential that warring parties and international mediators give priority to cease-fires that allow us to get polio vaccines to these children.”

But there are other hurdles that the GPEI faces in its quest to end polio transmissions by 2002 and a further three years of polio-free monitoring. “In order to stop transmission in all countries, additional funding is urgently needed,” it points out.

According to GPEI estimates, the final phase in the eradication campaign is expected to cost one billion dollars for the delivery of more than six billion doses of oral polio vaccines to 600 million children around the world by 2005. “Of this there is a 400 million dollar funding gap,” it states.

“This money must be foundá there is no option here,” said Frank Devlyn, president of Rotary International, the global service organisation that has contributed 407 million dollars to this effort since 1985.

Such concern is understandable in light of recent examples of polio outbreaks in countries that had been declared polio-free. According to the GPEI, in August 2000, an “imported polio virus” from Angola caused a major outbreak on the small West African island nation of Cape Verde, which had been polio-free for years. “This outbreak paralysed 44 people and killed 17.”

“Until global eradication, no child is safe,” affirms the GPEI in reference to the infectious disease caused by a virus that can be contracted by any age group, although it often affects children under three years old.

Currently, the poliovirus circulates in 20 countries, down from 30 in 1999 and 125 in 1988, reveals the GPEI’s figures. These countries, largely in Africa and South Asia, include Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Cote D’Ivoire.

Also listed are the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan.

Of these countries, 10 have been identified as “global priorities” and will be the focus of the final eradication phase. They include Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Pakistan, which are deemed “polio virus reservoirs” where transmission is intense.

According to the WHO, such a limited geographic spread of polio contrasts starkly with the situation that prevailed in the 1950s, when polio was responsible for crippling thousands of children every year in the developed world, too.

But following the discovery of effective vaccines in the late 1950s and early 1960s, polio was brought under control and “practically eliminated as a public health problem” in the developed world. The vaccines have also contributed to East Asia and Latin America being declared polio-free regions.

For Jalloh, such achievements have been attributed to three reasons: polio is a disease that can be eradicated, it does not “thrive outside human beings”, and there is an effective means to stamp it out.

“We must now close in on the remaining strongholds of the disease and use all possible resources to extinguish polio,” says Brundtland.