Polio continues to spread

Emergency immunization campaigns have been set up in Yemen and Indonesia.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
ABUJA, Nigeria -- The world's worst recent polio outbreak is being halted in northern Nigeria, but not before igniting a wildfire of new cases as far away as the Middle East and Asia that threatens to dramatically set back efforts to eradicate the once-vanishing disease.
In Yemen and Indonesia, international health workers are waging emergency immunization campaigns to stop new outbreaks there, and some experts fear the Nigerian flare-up, which has re-infected 16 formerly polio-free countries, could take hold in the Horn of Africa, where it could prove extremely difficult to oust again in troubled nations like Somalia.
A close eye
"We're watching Yemen carefully," said Bruce Aylward, the World Health Organization's global polio eradication coordinator. "If the Horn of Africa gets all re-infected, that will be a tough one. If this spreads further through Ethiopia to Somalia, then we will have a real grind to get it out of those places."
Yemen officials Tuesday reported 41 new cases of polio across the country, and UNICEF said it is shipping 6 million doses of polio vaccine there in an effort to vaccinate every child under 5. Yemen, which until recently had not seen a polio case since 1996, has a current child vaccination rate of only about 50 percent, health officials said.
Parts of the country are remote and lawless, which may make the vaccination campaign difficult, health workers warned.
In northern Nigeria, however, where nearly 800 children were paralyzed by polio in 2004, the crippling virus is coming under control and has struck 54 children so far this year, according to WHO figures.
The turnaround in Nigeria is due largely to dramatic new support for immunization in the Muslim-dominated north, the product of a national and international campaign to convince regional leaders the polio vaccine is safe.
Resistance to vaccination
Governors in some northern Nigerian states began barring immunization efforts in mid-2003, after a few politically ambitious religious leaders charged that the polio vaccine contained contaminants that could sterilize children or infect them with HIV.
Because giving children full immunity to polio can take up to seven doses of vaccine administered at least a month apart, government immunization teams visited homes several times. And in a region rife with suspicion of the southern-led government and with relatively few cases of polio, "people began looking around and saying, 'I don't see any disease. What's really going on here?"' Aylward said.
The problem worsened when initial testing of the vaccine found trace amounts of estrogen in a couple of samples. Scientists said the amounts were too small to have any effect, but vaccine opponents seized on the results as proof of a plot.