Friday 23 November, 2001
The fight against polio
The World Health Organisation has expressed its concern that innaccurate reporting of a recent series of child deaths in India may compromise a vast polio immunisation campaign in West Africa which starts this year.
The WHO says it's had a series of calls from local health workers warning that public unease is likely to keep parents and children away. BBC Science reports.
Immunisation campaign
The four-day campaign aims to immunise 80 million children in 16 West African countries against polio.
Children will be given vitamin A as well, to reduce their chances of blindness and malnutrition. But health workers in Nigeria have told the World Health Organisation (WHO) that the programme may have been compromised by what it says is alarmist reporting of child deaths in the Indian state of Assam.
Following a scheme earlier this month which distributed vitamin A to hundreds of thousands of children in Assam, up to twenty are believed to have died, although there is disagreement over the exact figure.
The incident has become highly politicized.
Blame
The Assam government has been quick to blame UNICEF, the United Nations agency which paid for the vitamin A, whereas UNICEF points out that the distribution programme is run by the government. It also says many of the deaths may not have been related to vitamin A.
What most alarmed the WHO, however, were early reports which erroneously said the children had also been given polio vaccine. It says these reports have caused a lot of concern in West Africa, and may mean that parents will be reluctant to bring their children forward for vaccination.
Reservoir for the polio virus
The WHO says that Nigeria is a reservoir for the polio virus; there have been over twenty cases reported this year, with smaller numbers in Niger, Mauretania and Sierra Leone.
The polio virus is easily spread in countries, such as Nigeria, which have poor sanitation and are densely populated.
In early 2001, Nigeria launched an immunisation campaign targeting 40 million children. The campaign was part of a UN drive to eliminate polio by the year 2005.
At the time, Unicef's deputy executive director, Kul Chandra Gautam, warned the disease could spread to areas which had been declared polio-free a decade ago. He added:
| "Until polio is eradicated everywhere, it will not be eradicated anywhere." |
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WHO believes tackling the virus in West Africa is vital to its global eradication plan.
Officials also point to the effectiveness of vitamin A supplementation. One recent scientific study concluded that globally, it prevented around a quarter of a million child deaths last year.
Parents in West Africa will be offered the choice of having the polio vaccine without vitamin A, though the WHO says the capsules it will be giving children are made in Canada and are quite safe.
Effectiveness
Polio campaigns have had to overcome many difficulties. Reaching remote areas with vaccines has been just one of them. Another has been reassuring parents of the effectiveness of certain vaccines, such as the “live vaccine”, which contains altered copies of the polio virus.
A study published in the Lancet medical journal in 2000 suggested the illness could return if the vaccination effort stops.
The live poliovirus vaccine is given by mouth to children, often in the form of a drop.
It has long been established that the altered viruses it contains, can be replicated in the gut of immunised children, and may gradually revert to the form which causes the disease.
There are a small number of cases of vaccine-induced polio, which occur as a result of immunisation programmes.
However, Action Research, a medical research charity that helped fund the development of Britain's first polio vaccine has called for reassurances that the world-wide immunisation programme would not suffer due to concern about the use of 'live vaccines'.
|  |  | | | Ceasefire for polio |  |
| | Recently in Sudan, the government declared a three-day ceasefire in war zones to allow for a nationwide campaign to vaccinate against polio.
More than 18,000 medical teams in have begun the campaign to vaccinate between five and seven million children against polio.
The health ministry’s initiative is supported by United Nations bodies and non-governmental organisations.
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