The World Health Organization (WHO) removed Nigeria from its polio-endemic List in 2015, meaning that all of Arica was free of the disease.
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“Clearly cases were missed, because this thing has been circulating for four years”, says Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesperson for the WHO’s Global Polio Eradication Initiative. “It is the tip of the proverbial iceberg”, he said.
World Health Organization added that the two new cases have underscored that reaching the children in affected areas requires vaccinating populations that move in and out of inaccessible areas and areas plagued by violence due to the Boko Haram insurgency, particularly in Nigeria’s north-east.
“The overriding priority now is to rapidly immunize all children around the affected area and ensure that no other child succumb to this bad disease, ” the minister stated.
Zaffran revealed that the two patients are a boy and a girl, both younger than 2 and from different parts of Borno state.
The suspects are said to have for too long plagued soldiers carrying out clearance operations in Gambori, Borno state.
Before the new cases, Nigeria was on track to be declared polio free on July 24, 2017.
As recently as August 10, Pate said he was hopeful that he would still see the end of polio, not just in Nigeria, but in all of Africa, by next year. As of now, there have only been 21 cases of wild poliovirus reported in 2016, with Pakistan and Afghanistan being the only other countries to report outbreaks.
But how could the virus have “disappeared” for two years before re-emerging? From a time about 70 years ago when polio would kill or cripple up to a half-million people a year, only 23 cases have been reported worldwide so far this year. This Thursday would have marked two years since someone on the African continent last contracted the wild-polio virus.
It’s unknown how many cases there are or how widespread the Borno outbreak is. Since then, the WHO said the country has made substantial strides in beating the disease thanks to concerted efforts by all levels of government, civil society, religious leaders and tens of thousands of health workers. Even in the most insecure countries, such as Syria and Somalia, health officials are sometimes able to mount “hit-and-run” vaccination strikes that get them out of risky areas in just a few hours.
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Global organisations plan to support Nigerian health workers in using “a hit-and-run kind of strategy”, said the WHO director for polio eradication, Michel Zaffran.
