The first polio outbreak to hit Indonesia in a decade has now infected 111 children, the World Health Organisation said Tuesday, confirming dozens of new cases and urging wider immunisation. A total of 45 youngsters have been diagnosed with the crippling disease this week, adding to 66 already being treated, but officials warned that more cases could be on the way.
A major immunisation campaign has already been launched in Indonesia, reaching 6.5 million children. Some 24 million youngsters are expected to be targeted in two months of vaccinations starting in August.
But the rapid spread of the disease has already dealt a major blow to a United Nations programme aimed at the global elimination of polio by the end of 2005.
"There are a lot of cases," WHO polio campaign spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer told AFP from the organisation's headquarters in Geneva. "This is a big outbreak."
A WHO spokeswoman in Jakarta, Sari Setiogi, said laboratory tests on Monday confirmed that 13 additional children had been identified with the disease. A further 21 were confirmed early Tuesday, followed by 11 later the same day.
She said all the latest cases were infants who contracted the disease - which can cause paralysis, muscular atrophy and sometimes death - before a "mop up" round of immunisations took place in the outbreak's epicentre.
"All confirmed cases were samples taken before the mopping up, but we believe that the country needs more in terms of immunisation coverage," she told AFP.
The first resurgence of polio, which was thought to have been eliminated from Indonesia in 1996, was detected in late April on the densely-populated island of Java, close to the capital Jakarta.
So far immunisations have been confined to Java, but the confirmation of a new case on the neighbouring island of Sumatra this week underscored the need for a broader campaign.
I Nyoman Kandun, the Health Ministry's director general for disease control and environmental health, said although the vaccinations would hamper infection rates, he feared the number of cases could keep rising.
"It is possible and that's why we have carried out several immediate responsive actions to slow the spread of polio," he told AFP.
Kandun rejected criticism that Jakarta had not done enough to prevent more children from being infected. "We are hitting hard on the vaccination drives. We are intensively focusing on this effort," he said.
Polio is believed to have returned to Indonesia via Saudi Arabia, either through migrant workers or Islamic pilgrims returning from Mecca, who may have passed on a strain of the virus originating in Nigeria.
The waterborne disease remains endemic in only six countries - Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan - with vaccinations driving down the number of cases from 350,000 in 1988 to a few thousand in recent years.
But a handful of African and Middle Eastern nations have reported being re-infected following a brief boycott on polio vaccines in Nigeria. It was prompted by radical Muslim clerics who claimed the vaccine had been contaminated by US agents.
Comments
Comments are closed.