JEDDAH, 11 May 2005 — Saudi Arabia has taken all precautions to prevent the polio virus from entering the country following the outbreak of a major epidemic in neighboring Yemen.
“We are aware of the situation in Yemen and have taken all the necessary precautions to prevent the virus from crossing into our borders especially the southern regions closer to Yemen,” said Dr. Khaled Merghalani, director general of health awareness and media at the Ministry of Health.
“We have launched a major awareness and immunization campaign and we have not reported any new cases since last December,” Dr. Merghalani told Arab News. “The worry has always been locally transmitted cases and there are none here; the three cases reported last year were imported,” he explained.
The latest case reported in Saudi Arabia by the World Health Organization involved a Nigerian boy who had been living near Makkah. He fell ill in mid-December 2004 after the family hosted visitors from Nigeria.
Senior WHO officials at the time played down the possible long-term impact of the three cases because of “impeccable” Saudi sanitary precautions for the Haj, and high levels of vaccination coverage in Saudi Arabia — 95 percent — which were regularly maintained.
The polio outbreak in Yemen could cripple more than 100 children before it is brought under control, WHO said yesterday.
A Yemeni Health Ministry official said in Sanaa on Monday the number of children diagnosed with the paralyzing disease had risen to 40, nearly double the initial 22 cases the WHO confirmed in late April.
But the WHO said more suspected cases were under investigation.
“We expect the total number associated with this outbreak will rise to more than 100 before the outbreak is controlled,” WHO spokesman Oliver Rosenbauer told Reuters in Geneva.
The disease, which mainly affects children under the age of five, causes irreversible paralysis. Low immunization rates among children in Yemen, which last reported polio in 1996, have helped the virus spread, according to the WHO.
A nationwide immunization campaign is planned in the second half of May. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is sending six million doses of oral polio vaccine, due to arrive in the Arab country next week, according to the WHO spokesman.
“Past experience has shown that with rapid, high-quality immunization, such sporadic outbreaks can be controlled,” Rosenbauer said.
Yemen was the 15th polio-free country in which the disease has reappeared in the last two years, including 13 African countries and Saudi Arabia.
Last week four cases were confirmed in Indonesia, which last had polio a decade ago. The twin outbreaks are fresh setbacks to the WHO’s campaign to stop transmission of polio worldwide by year-end.
Meanwhile, WHO and UNICEF officials say that the Gulf nations are not doing enough to support efforts to eradicate the virus despite the fact that it is spreading in Islamic countries. “It would be a good sign for Islamic countries to see other Islamic countries giving,” said Dr. David Heymann, the WHO representative for polio eradication. “But they’ve come in more slowly than we expected.” Fighting the disease has cost nearly $4 billion since the eradication campaign began in 1985, and the campaign is urgently trying to raise $250 million to handle the outbreaks that have taken place this year, but the Gulf states have given less than $3 million so far including $500,000 by Saudi Arabia.
Kul Gautam, the deputy executive director of UNICEF, which buys vaccine for poor countries, said it was unfortunate that donations from wealthy Gulf nations “still make up such a small proportion of the overall contribution to this global public good.”
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, agreed that Islamic states would have to increase their efforts and said he would raise the issue at a meeting of OIC foreign ministers in late June.
