World Health Organization declares African polio

NEveryone knows the identity of thousands of African children to date Absent This year killed or paralyzed by polio. In normal times, thousands of people traced the path of suffering and death for generations, last year, and thousands of years ago, making them difficult to track no matter what. was.

Instead, African children were not charged this year, last year, or the year before by polio. The last case of polio circulating in the wild was reported in Nigeria in 2016. Nigeria is the last of the 54 African countries where the disease is endemic. And after the required multi-year waiting period has passed, there are now no cases, and today the World Health Organization has officially declared the whole of Africa polio-free. The disease, which had recently been endemic in 125 countries in the late 1980s and claimed to have 350,000 children annually, has only spread to two locations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Cumulative total of 102 by 2020.. This is 102, but nothing denies the scope of WHO’s announcement.

“Today’s victory over wild polioviruses in Africa demonstrates what can happen when partners in different sectors work together to achieve key global health goals,” says Rotary International. Said John Huco, the general secretary and chief executive officer of “[It is] In these turbulent times, the world can and should aim for. “

Rotary, an international nonprofit organization, reached the end of polio in 1988, Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). The program leverages the power of Rotary’s 35,000 clubs and 122,000 members in 200 countries and territories around the world to make polio the only second human illness after smallpox and extinction. I aimed to drive it to the brink of. This work has been facilitated by Rotary’s immediately-attracted partners, WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and UNICEF. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation joined in 2007, followed by the vaccine alliance Gavi last year. The 32-year initiative relies on volunteer workers and charitable donations, which create an army of 20 million field workers to vaccinate more than 2.5 billion children at a cost of $1.7 billion. It was

Some countries had a lighter rise than others. In the United States, the disease was eradicated in 1979, long before GPEI began its work. Other countries followed: In 1994 the Americas were declared polio-free. In 2002, when all 53 countries in the WHO-designated European region were declared virus-free, Europe as a whole passed a sound bill. A large-scale vaccination effort began in India in 1997 and eradicated the virus in 2014.

How polio was eradicated from the African continent

However, Africa has a vast population of vast villages, long distances to hospitals in cities, and unstable infrastructure such as proper roads and reliable “cold chains”-to keep the vaccine running. Having a refrigerated transportation network has always created special challenges. In 1996, when the number of incidents on the continent reached 75,000 casualties each year, South African President Nelson Mandela worked with Rotary to launch the “Kick Polio Out of Africa” ​​campaign. So many children vaccinating vast areas. In 2000, the first synchronized campaign started in 17 countries and 76 million children were vaccinated by tens of thousands of volunteers. This work will cover the entire continent, including a massive attack from a large multinational vaccination of 85 million people in 24 countries in western and central Africa from 2008 to 2010. It has spread.

Finally, Nigeria was the only African country in which the disease was still endemic, due to resistance by religious leaders in the northern part of the country who challenged interference in the western part of the region and claimed that the vaccine was unsafe. Stood alone. The opposition went bankrupt thanks to Muhammad Sanusi II, the head of the city of Kano, a hereditary leader who is a descendant of the ruling family. A small bottle of polio vaccine was brought to the stage where the audience saw it, broke the seal and swallowed the entire contents. That year, the country recorded the last polio case, and this year, WHO certification in Nigeria is a reward for that effort.

“The Nigerian polio eradication program has gone through some difficult times, but we have never doubted that this day will come.” “Whenever we experience a setback, Rotary and us Partners were able to find a solution and develop a new strategy to reach vulnerable children.”

Next steps towards global eradication

Other challenges remain. For one, the stubborn polio problem of Afghanistan and Pakistan remains, but Funsho is cautiously optimistic. “Afghanistan and Pakistan have their own set of challenges in the fight against wild polioviruses, as did the African region and Nigeria,” he says. “We cannot time stamp wild polio eradication in the other two countries. Lessons learned in Nigeria and Africa show that eradication can only be achieved through global efforts.”

Moreover, it is not just wild polio that causes the disease. Oral vaccines contain live but attenuated viruses, which can rarely mutate and lead to diseases designed to prevent them. So far this year, 302 cases of vaccine-derived polio have occurred in both endemic and non-endemic countries. All of these are not as localized and widespread as wild polio. Again, the number of cases is low by previous criteria, but too high by victim children and families.

Preventing these infections ultimately means supplementing the live oral viral vaccine with an injectable variety that uses the killed virus without causing disease. Disadvantages of killed vaccines: It requires trained healthcare workers to manage shots. Thus, the final round of vaccination will be more costly and labor-intensive than the previous round, but only after a few cases of vaccine origin have been eliminated will the polio tragedy come to history. Funsho and others are convinced that it will happen.

“One thing I know for sure is that if Nigeria can eliminate the wild poliovirus, any country can eliminate it,” he says.

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Write in Jeffrey Kruger [email protected]..