Angolan health officials on high alert after polio case confirmed

Health officials in the northern Angolan province of Uige are on high alert "after a 14-month-old boy tested positive for polio, which has made a resurgence in the country, UNICEF said Thursday," Agence France-Presse reports (11/3). "After eliminating new polio cases for three years in succession following its 27-year civil war, Angola saw a strain of the crippling virus reappear in 2005," the news service adds.

"UNICEF Angola Representative Dr. Koenraad Vanormelingen says health workers are 'very close to interrupting transmission in Angola,'" the Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle writes (11/3). "Last year, Angola registered 33 new polio cases, the DRC 93 and Congo 50, raising concern among anti-polio campaigners, who had already considered the disease to be eradicated in all three countries," AFP notes, adding, "Angola has had just five new cases this year, UNICEF said, crediting a mass immunization drive with slowing the outbreak" (11/3).