Thursday, May 05, 2005
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LONDON: The battle to eradicate polio from the globe received another serious setback on Tuesday with news that the disease had spread to Indonesia as well as Yemen, both of which have been polio-free for nearly a decade. The World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed that an 18-month-old child had been paralysed by polio in a village in west Java, Indonesia. The case was declared the first since 1995. Seven more suspected cases are being investigated. Teams of WHO staff flew to Indonesia to help the Government limit the outbreak. Four thousand children in four villages have already been immunised. That news followed hard on the heels of revelations that there had been 22 confirmed polio cases in the past fortnight in Yemen, which has been free of polio since 1996. The strain of polio virus in all the cases has been identified as the one that caused a large outbreak of the disease in Nigeria last year. Immunisation against polio had to be stopped in the Nigerian State of Kano in August 2003 because of local suspicions and rumours that the vaccine had been designed to make Muslim children infertile. After intense negotiations and a supply of the vaccine made in an Islamic country — ironically, Indonesia — the immunisation programme began again last August. But the virus, which was responsible for 814 cases of polio in Niger and Nigeria up to March this year, was carried out of Nigeria into neighbouring countries such as Sudan and now has travelled as far as Indonesia. WHO staff said on Monday they did not know whether the virus had gone straight from Sudan to Indonesia, or whether it had first been conveyed to Saudi Arabia, the site of two cases. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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