International health experts said Thursday that a fraught global battle to eradicate polio was likely to reach its target next year, although they singled out Nigeria as the greatest obstacle to their bid.
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An independent oversight body of the World Health Organisation's Global Polio Eradication Initiative recommended that vaccination programmes should be intensified in the last remaining countries with the disease in Africa, South Asia and Indonesia.
High hopes for new vaccine
The experts from the WHO, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), and the UN Childrens' Fund (UNICEF), said they had high hopes for a new type of vaccine that had proved to be far more effective in the hot climate and dense populations found in Egypt and India.
"There is no reason why polio should exist anywhere in the world by the end of next year," said Steve Cochi, an immunisation expert at the CDC and chairman of the advisory committee.
"Countries must respond more rapidly and on a wider scale," he told journalists.
The advisory committee also advocated wider mass immunisation campaigns with the new "monovalent" vaccine, to mop up remaining strains of the virus in more recent outbreaks of the disease in Angola, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Somalia.
Major challenges remain
The experts said major challenges remained, notably in Nigeria which has had 13 times more confirmed cases (489) this year than the next country where polio is endemic, India (37).
"The committee concluded that Nigeria is the single greatest risk to polio eradication at the present time," Cochi said.
However, the disease, which is clustered in the north of the country, is declining after it gained momentum during a 12-month suspension of mass immunisation in 2003 and 2004 due to local religious objections to the vaccine.
Could be eradicated
Cochi said polio could be eradicated in Nigeria in a year, and faster elsewhere.
Over the period until October 2004, Nigeria had 624 confirmed polio cases, according to WHO data.
Other outstanding challenges include the export of the disease from reservoirs like India and Nigeria to neighbouring countries, but also as far afield as Indonesia and East Africa, the health officials said.
There have been 1 349 cases of polio in the world so far this year compared to 821 over the same period in 2004.
Most of the increase in 2005 has been caused by outbreaks in Indonesia and Yemen, where the disease had been eradicated, which were caused by infected travellers who brought the virus back into those countries.
"This year is different than what has occurred in history in that there are more polio cases due to importation of the virus into previously polio-free countries, as opposed to the six endemic countries in the world,"
The endemic countries are Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan.
Indonesian outbreak still expanding
Cochi cautioned that the outbreak in Indonesia - where 264 people are reported to be ill with polio, according to the WHO - was continuing to expand and was not completely under control because of a delayed response.
A third nationwide immunisation campaign in Indonesia is scheduled for November.
International efforts to eradicate polio by 2000 failed, although the disease was sharply reduced by then to 712 cases compared to 350 000 in 1988.
In a further setback, 19 countries were reinfected or suffered a resurgence of polio over the last two years, in the wake of the halt to immunisation in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, and a surge in India. – (AFP)
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