Nigeria to immunise 4.6 million children against polio
Sat Jul 5, 11:36 AM ET

Nigerian health workers Saturday began house-to-house immunization of
4.6 million children under the age of five in the northern state of
Kano in a new drive to eradicate the disease.

"Health personnel from all over the country are in Kano for the four-
day polio immunization campaign during which we intend to immunise 4.6
million children against polio virus," Abdurrahman Yakubu, Kano state
coordinator of the National Programme of Immunization (NPI), told AFP.

For four days 26,000 health workers will go door-to-door in the 484
wards of the state administering oral polio drops to those under five
years old, he said.

"We have decided to employ a staggering strategy of pulling personnel
and logistics in one polio-endemic area at a time as a means of
effectively fighting the polio virus," senior health official Ado
Abdullahi told AFP.

Kano has been the epicentre of the transmission of the crippling polio
virus to other parts of the world since 2003 when the authorities
suspended polio immunization for 13 months.

The suspension followed claims by radical Muslim clerics and some
medical doctors that the vaccine was laced with substances that could
render girls infertile as part of a US-led Western plot to depopulate
Africa .

Although the state resumed its polio campaign after clinical trials in
and outside Nigeria proved the vaccine safe, Kano had already infected
other countries in the region that were considered polio-free and the
crippling disease spread to other parts of the world.

The World Health Organisation has recently listed Nigeria, India,
Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only polio-endemic countries in the
world.

"A Type 1 polio outbreak is right now raging in northern Nigeria. Of
every 10 children paralysed by the Type 1 polio virus this year, eight
are in Nigeria," Margaret Chan, WHO director-general told a Rotary
conference in California last month.

Out of 405 polio cases currently recorded in Nigeria, Kano accounts
for 138 cases, which represents 34 percent of all the cases, according
to WHO.

Copyright © 2008 Agence France Presse.
Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080705/hl_afp/nigeriahealthdiseasepolio_080705153659