Vaccine drive to tackle risks of Nigeria polio spread

GENEVA (Reuters) - Some 53 million West African children will be vaccinated against polio in schools, health clinics and their homes over the next month to tackle risks from the paralysing virus in Nigeria.

The $67 million campaign, spanning eight countries, aims to increase immunity levels in one of the last strongholds of the disease that the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF have spent more than 20 years and $6 billion trying to eradicate.

"The plan is to reach every child, even in the most rural areas or in the most populated urban areas," UNICEF spokeswoman Miranda Eeles said. "The campaign aims at reaching a critical mass of polio immunisation coverage in order to stop the spread of the wild polio virus."

Polio, which spreads in areas with poor sanitation, attacks the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs, within hours of infection. Children under the age of 3 are most vulnerable to the disease that until the 1950s crippled thousands of people every year in rich nations.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative spent $6.13 billion from 1988 to 2008 to wipe out the disease, which remains endemic in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. When the campaign started, some 125 countries had never stopped its spread.

So far this year, Nigeria has had 30 cases of polio-induced paralysis, compared to 19 in the first two months of 2008.

The new West African campaign, being undertaken by more than 162,000 immunisers, will include two rounds of door-to-door vaccinations and immunisation drives in schools and health clinics in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Togo, as well as Nigeria.

Worldwide, there have been 68 known cases of polio paralysis in 2009 to date, compared to 111 in the same period last year.

Much of the global decline reflects a fall in India, which had just 13 reported infections in January and February compared to 82 in the first two months of 2008. Afghanistan's caseload was steady at 2 and Pakistan had 7 cases compared to 2 in the same period last year.

Major supporters of the polio eradication drive include the United States, Britain, and India, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rotary International. Microsoft founder Bill Gates travelled to Nigeria earlier this month to review progress in the country's polio fight, whose success he said "can lead the way to a polio-free Africa."