Somalia marks one year of being polio

In a Horn of Africa outbreak assessment completed in June 2015, an assessment team concluded that transmission in Kenya and Ethiopia has also been interrupted.

A milestone has been reached for Africa for making it through and marking its first year since the last recorded case of polio and the day has been celebrated with the United Nations making it a major step towards the elimination of the disease.

According to WHO, if polio is eradicated from the world, there will be an estimated $50-billion savings over the next 20 years and if failed, it could result with up to 200,000 new cases a year within ten years.

There is cause to celebrate that Africa is now on track, one year polio free and hopefully more to come until the infectious disease will be forever eradicated.

“The focus remains on continuing to vaccinate children, no matter where they live, and to strengthen surveillance everywhere”.

Apart from battling polio, many nations of the continent have been fighting Islamist militant groups al-Shabaab and Boko Haram.

“Based on information from security agencies, we send a larger number of teams which can complete immunisation activities in fewer days” said Dr Tunji Funsho, the chairman of Nigeria National PolioPlus Committee for Rotary global.

It is one of the most tragic conditions affecting young children that can be stopped through a simple vaccine, but has no cure if the virus has already set in.

“In some of the areas that are security compromised, the herd immunity is about 75% now”. We never want to see another Somali child being paralyzed by this preventable virus.

The herd immunity he mentioned is when the vaccination of a significant portion of a population provides some protection for individuals who have not developed immunity. The onset date of the last case reported was exactly August 11, 2014.

Yet, it is a country that had gone for six years without polio before an outbreak in May 2013 in the capital, Mogadishu.

Steven Lauwerier, the Somalia’s UNICEF’s chief, “We have had no new cases for a year despite all the challenges in the country”.

The exercise, however, went on in most parts of the country and in the end the government said it had been successful.

It said, success comes when there is proper monitoring of polio cases and continuation of campaigns for the vaccinations.

The country hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries with low vaccination rates, like Somalia.

A polio-free Africa would leave only Pakistan and Afghanistan where the disease had not been wiped out, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which said the one-year mark was a key signal of the “important progress toward eradication”.