cbaker_admin
Wed, 08/26/2020 – 09:30
The Africa Regional Certification Commission for Polio Eradication on Tuesday certified that the continent is free of wild polio, 4 years after Nigeria reported the last known case. “This is a momentous milestone for Africa. Now future generations of African children can live free of wild polio,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s Africa regional director. In the 1990s, before then-South African president Nelson Mandela launched a continent-wide campaign to end infections in 1996, poliovirus paralyzed about 75,000 African children each year. The disease has not been completely eliminated in Africa, as 16 nations are dealing with outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived polio, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. The mutations that can lead to that are extremely rare, however, with just 760 cases of vaccine-derived virus identified and more than 10 billion doses of oral polio vaccine administered since 2000. WHO officials say they anticipate that continued surveillance and vaccination would eradicate even the vaccine-derived cases of polio.
