Angola immunizes 5 million children in polio fight
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Angola stepped up its fight against polio on Sunday, with mothers out in force to take advantage of a nationwide immunization drive after the first appearance of the disease in the African country in four years.
The three-day, $3.74 million campaign was run by the Health Ministry, the United Nations Childrens Fund UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) and is aimed at stopping polio before it spreads.
Angola this month identified three new cases of the disease—two in the capital Luanda and one in the western province of Benguela—the first such cases since 2001.
The diagnoses, along with a new outbreak of polio in Indonesia, were a setback to the WHO, which has campaigned to stop the global spread of polio by the year’s end.
In northern Bengo, a rural province that borders Luanda, health workers and parents were on high alert as medical staff in four-wheel-drive vehicles traveled to the far corners of the region armed with oral polio vaccines.
“These two cases in Luanda have made us very concerned because Luanda is our neighbor, it is very close to us,” said Zhenzo Makonda-Mbuta, head of Bengo’s public health department. “Polio is very contagious. We don’t want it here, so we need to react to make a barrier.”
REMOTE AREAS
Angola’s national routine immunization coverage is just 45 percent, with coverage in remote areas particularly patchy as the health network struggles to rebuild following the end of 27 years of civil war.
The national offensive enlisted 12,500 teams to go house-to-house and visit markets and churches to make sure the vaccines reached the targeted five million children.
But news of the return of polio, a highly-infectious disease which affects mainly the under-fives and can cause total paralysis in hours, had traveled fast. Most mothers were lining up to get their children immunized.
“We heard about the new cases on the radio so we are very happy that these teams are coming here,” said Lucia, whose 10-month-old daughter was vaccinated as they shopped in Bengo’s capital Caxito. “Every mother fears the return of polio and wants to protect her child.”
In Luanda and Benguela, the campaign focused on stamping out the type-1 strain of polio, believed to have entered Angola from India.
“We imported very quickly a monovalent oral polio vaccine which is 90 percent effective in targeting this strain of the virus and was used only in areas where we have seen cases,” said Mario Ferrari, UNICEF’s representative in Angola.
Elsewhere, the teams used a trivalent vaccine that produces antibodies to all three strains of the virus.
Ferrari said the partners were mulling a third national immunization round after a second already planned for the end of August. Several doses of vaccine are needed to fully protect a child from polio.
Polio is the latest health scare to hit Angola, which earlier this year fought an outbreak of the rare Ebola-like Marburg fever that claimed more than 300 lives.
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