Indonesia says it’s getting control of polio outbreak
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Indonesia is bringing its first outbreak of polio in a decade under control, but the virus may exist elsewhere besides a concentration of villages in West Java province, a senior health official said on Monday.
Umar Fahmi, the top official in charge of communicable diseases at the Health Ministry, told Reuters the number of positive cases of polio was now four, after one child had been cleared.
“We can say it’s under control, although it really depends on where the virus has travelled to.
It’s really important to focus (immunisation) on those villages, which we’re now mopping up,” Fahmi said, referring to an area near the city of Sukabumi.
Health officials are studying up to 10 other possible cases of polio, which mainly hits children under five and can cause irreversible paralysis, deformation and sometimes death.
Fahmi said the immunisation drive had been stepped up around Sukabumi, where the virus was first detected last month.
Almost 5,000 infants had been immunised free of charge by health authorities who had gone door-to-door in villages in the area, some 100 km (62 miles) south of Jakarta, he said.
But the leading Kompas daily reported some residents had refused to have their children immunised because they were unaware of the benefits and thought they would have to pay.
Fahmi played down the report, saying all residents had welcomed the health officials.
With help from the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund, Indonesia will launch a major drive at the end of May to immunise 5.2 million children in West Java, the nearby province of Banten and Jakarta.
Some 40,000 volunteers need to be trained and the children registered before the drive begins.
The world’s largest archipelago is the 16th previously polio-free country to be reinfected in the past two years, including 13 in Africa, according to the Geneva-based WHO.
The WHO says the Indonesian cases are almost identical to a polio strain circulating in parts of Africa and that the disease may have reached the country from Africa via the Middle East.
Health officials said it may have been carried by a migrant worker or a Haj pilgrim who visited Saudi Arabia before returning to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
There were 1,267 cases of polio worldwide in 2004, up from 784 the previous year, according to the U.N. health agency, which says that it is short of funds to complete its immunisation campaign this year and continue it in 2006.
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