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Lilongwe (Malawi) (AFP) – Malawi announced on Thursday that it will launch a national polio vaccination campaign in March, following the detection of its first case in 30 years and the first in Africa in five years.
The southern African country declared the discovery of a case of wild poliovirus a week ago.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) representative in Malawi, Janet Kayita, the four-year-old girl who was diagnosed with polio was not fully vaccinated.
The authorities aim to vaccinate nearly three million children under the age of five. “The next polio vaccination campaign, in four weeks, (…) will target around 2.9 million children across the country,” Queen Dube, director of the country’s health ministry, told AFP. Malawi.
Malawi has placed an order for approximately 14 million doses of vaccine. Vaccination should extend beyond Malawi’s borders and target certain districts in neighboring countries, she added.
Ms Dube said an emergency meeting of international health regulators was scheduled for Monday and she might recommend compulsory vaccination of travelers to Malawi to curb the spread of the virus.
UNICEF representative in Malawi Rudolf Schwenk on Tuesday described the outbreak as “a very serious situation”. “We must collectively take swift action because this is a national emergency,” he told a news conference.
Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera has declared a national health emergency.
Laboratory analyzes showed that the detected strain is related to a strain that circulated in Sindh province, Pakistan.
Polio, an infectious and contagious virus that attacks the spinal cord and causes irreversible paralysis in children, remains endemic in Pakistan and its neighboring country, Afghanistan.
Africa was declared free of native wild polio in August 2020 following eliminating all forms of wild polio. No cases of polio have been recorded on the continent in the past four years – the eradication threshold.
© 2022 AFP
