HOPES that polio will be wiped out worldwide before the World Health Organization鈥檚 deadline in December took another blow this week, with the confirmation of Indonesia鈥檚 first case for a decade.
The polio reference laboratory in Mumbai, India, confirmed on 2 May that an 18-month-old boy from a village in West Java has the crippling disease. Others in the area have symptoms. Indonesian officials plan to vaccinate five million children in West Java, including the capital Jakarta, to stop the disease spreading.
鈥淭he outbreak has spread to 16 countries along trade and pilgrimage routes鈥�
Advertisement
The virus is almost identical to a strain found in Saudi Arabia in December. It originates from northern Nigeria, where local officials blocked polio vaccinations for nearly a year, claiming they were a western plot to make Muslim girls infertile. The resulting outbreak has now spread to 16 countries, following trade and pilgrimage routes, and emergency vaccination campaigns in Ivory Coast, Yemen and Sudan have not yet stemmed the outbreaks. Even before the Indonesian discovery, the WHO had appealed to donors for $50 million to keep vaccinating threatened areas.
