BMJ  2005;330:1106 (14 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7500.1106

News

WHO's attempts to eradicate polio are thwarted in Africa and Asia

Owen Dyer

London

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Outbreaks of polio in Yemen and Indonesia, and the threat of polio returning to troubled regions of Africa, have dealt a blow to the World Health Organization's polio eradication programme in what was meant to be the final year of a 17 year campaign.

A total of 63 cases of polio have been identified in Yemen, and last week four cases were confirmed in Indonesia.

Bruce Aylward, coordinator of WHO's global polio eradication programme, said that many of the patients in the Yemen were paralysed. "Since polio only paralyses at most one child per 200 people infected, 50 identified cases of paralysis would mean at least 10 000 infections," he said.

The strain of poliovirus causing the new outbreaks originated in Kano province in northern Nigeria. In 2003 Kano was the focal point of a Nigerian Muslim boycott of polio vaccination, after local imams claimed that the vaccine was part . . . [Full text of this article]

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