Health Officials Refocusing Polio Immunizations On Hardest-Hit Countries

May 13, 2003

TOKYO (AP) -- World health officials, aiming to wipe out polio by 2005, will focus their immunization campaign on the seven countries still battling the crippling disease and six others at risk of infection, a coalition of organizations announced Tuesday.

Over the next two years, an estimated 297 million oral polio vaccines and US$35 million no longer needed for polio-free regions will be redirected to the 13 countries, the World Health Organization, U.N. Children's Fund, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Rotary International said in a joint statement.

The shift in resources was partly caused by a scarcity of funds.

"We are having difficulty with financing, so we had to prioritize," UNICEF Japan program coordinator Yasushi Katsuma said at a news conference in Tokyo.

Officials predict the eradication program will cost US$275 million from the end of 2002 through 2005, and expect a US$33 million shortfall this year alone.

Polio attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis and, occasionally, death. It is transmitted through food or water contaminated by the feces of an infected person. There is no cure.

Once an epidemic, the disease has disappeared from much of the planet.

Last year, polio affected 1,919 people and was endemic in only seven countries: Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Niger, Pakistan and Somalia.

Six other countries -- Angola, Bangladesh, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nepal and Sudan -- have no reported cases but remain at high risk of infection because of their proximity to polio-ravaged areas and low rates of vaccinations, Katsuma said.

Among the infected countries, India, Pakistan and Nigeria account for 99 percent of all cases, WHO said.

Health officials say the virus spreads most easily in urban slums and remote villages, where overcrowding, poor sanitation and nutrition, and a lack of health care services are problems. Indifference toward vaccinations, transient communities and religious and ethnic tensions have complicated prevention programs, they say.

The last major disease to be successfully eradicated under a WHO-sponsored vaccination program was smallpox, which saw its last case in 1978.

To be declared disease-free, a country must have no new cases for three years.