More than 110 million children to benefit from vaccination against polio, WHO
New York, 22 Mar – (ANA) - A United Nations-backed campaign will seek to vaccinate more than 111 million children under the age of five against polio in 20 African countries in just four days.
“The upcoming campaign in West and Central Africa will aim to cover all children, immunized or not, in order to boost their protection levels and
deprive the virus of the fertile seedbed on which it depends for survival,” said the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, Luis Sambo.
“This exercise should bring us closer to reaching our goal of interrupting wild polio virus transmission in our region in 2012.” Of the 20 targeted countries, Nigeria is the only polio endemic country, where 57.7 million children will be provided with two drops of oral vaccine each. The other 19 countries are Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), Niger, Cameroon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. Together, the 19 countries account for nearly 53.3 million children who will be targeted in the campaign. Due to the presence of the disease in Nigeria, the risk of importation of the polio virus remains high in West Africa, with Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali and Niger having seen the resurgence of the virus last year. (ANA)
FA/ANA/22 March 2012--------