After four years, Angola reports its first case of polio

After four years, Angola has reported its first case of polio. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday that the crippling disease polio has also spread within Indonesia to Sumatra island.

The latest incidents, of the paralysis of a baby girl in the Angolan capital Luanda, and of a three-year-old girl in Lampung province on Sumatra, bring Indonesia's cases of polio to 66 since the outbreak began in May.

The news is yet another blow to WHO in its bid to stop the global spread of polio by the end of the year.

Polio can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours, it re-emerged in Indonesia in May.

Until then the country had been polio-free since 1995.

The first case was near the West Java city of Sukabumi, 100 km south of Jakarta, but this latest case indicates that the virus has jumped westward from the main island Java to Sumatra.

Yet another round of immunisation was carried out earlier this week, targeting 6.4 million Indonesian children under the age of five in West Java, Banten and Jakarta provinces.

The WHO says that Lampung and Central Java will be included in the next phase of the large-scale immunisation campaigns which will start in August.

According to the United Nations health agency, Angola is the 17th, previously polio-free country to be reinfected since 2003, when the virus began circulating widely in Africa.

A 10-month ban on vaccination in the northern state of Kano was initially blamed for the virus spreading across Africa, reaching Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but genetic analysis has shown it was imported from another endemic region, India, and not Nigeria.

According to the WHO, a nationwide polio vaccination campaign is planned for July 29-31 in Angola, where only 45 percent of children are estimated to be vaccinated.

http://www.who.int