CAPE TOWN, South Africa — As the world eagerly awaits a coronavirus vaccine, Africa got some good news recently as polio was declared eradicated, leaving only one region in the world where the wild strain of the virus remains.
Polio is a highly contagious disease that is generally passed through the fecal-oral route, or sometimes through contaminated food and water. It affects mainly children under the age of 5 and can cause paralysis.
“The ARCC (African Regional Commission for the Certification of the Eradication of Poliomyelitis) certifies that the African region has interrupted the transmission of indigenous wild polio virus,” announced the independent body’s chairperson, Rose Leke.
Leke, who was among WHO representatives, heads of state and philanthropists who spoke via video conference to mark the announcement, called it a “historic public health achievement.”
Wild polio cases have decreased by 99.9 percent since vaccination programs were widely introduced in 1988, but until recently Nigeria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Cameroon still had pockets of infection.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari — whose country was the last on the continent to be declared free of wild polio — warned that Africa must “avoid a resurgence of this disease.”
“We must continue to vaccinate our children, because vaccines save lives,” the president added.
Challenges to immunization, and therefore eradication, include displaced communities, political unrest and geographic isolation — as well as suspicion of vaccines.
Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, noted that in Nigeria, for example, “there were negative attitudes” surrounding vaccines to the extent that some health workers there have been killed.
With the African region declared polio-free, five of the six WHO regions, representing over 90 percent of the world’s population, are now free of the wild polio virus.
Only Afghanistan and Pakistan, where health teams carrying out immunization programs are regularly attacked, still suffer endemic transmission of the virus.
However, while so-called wild polio has been eradicated in most of the world now, vaccine-derived polio continues to be a problem in some places.
When a person is given the oral vaccine, the virus stays in their intestine for some time. If the vaccine-virus is then excreted in areas of inadequate sanitation, those who have not been immunized can be infected.
In Africa, the last case of paralysis from wild polio virus was reported in Nigeria four years ago, but there are currently 16 African countries battling vaccine-derived polio, according to the World Health Organization.
Globally, wild polio virus cases have decreased from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 33 reported cases in 2018, according to WHO figures. More than 1.8 million people are able to walk today who would otherwise have been paralyzed, the WHO says.
