JEDDAH, 12 February 2005 — Three cases of polio have been “imported” into Saudi Arabia since September, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
But senior WHO officials in Geneva 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. However, the WHO highlighted the risk of the disease spreading from West Africa with pilgrims coming to Makkah.
The latest case reported by WHO involved a Nigerian boy who had been living near Makkah for the past two years. He fell ill in mid-December 2004 after the family hosted visitors from Nigeria.
“This child became sick with polio despite having vaccinated against polio,” David Heymann, the head of the WHO’s polio eradication program told journalists in Geneva.
He said infections despite immunization were not unusual in hot conditions.
The boy has now recovered and an investigation is under way to determine if the virus was being reimported or the infection was spreading inside Saudi Arabia.
While the vaccine is very effective in temperate climates, in tropical areas it often has more trouble taking hold because of poor health and sanitary conditions surrounding children there.
The Nigerian boy in Saudi Arabia had been immunized five times, and some children needed to be vaccinated up to 13 times until they gained full immunity from all types of the polio virus, Heymann explained.
“Pilgrims are one way that polio virus can be spread but there are many other ways, just international travel of any kind,” he added, urging all countries to maintain surveillance for the crippling and potentially deadly disease.
“The disease is going everywhere until it is eradicated everywhere,” WHO polio official Bruce Aylward said.
Five of the six countries where polio is still endemic — Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Niger and Pakistan — are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as well as several newly infected countries in Africa, Heymann noted. The sixth country where polio is endemic is India.
The global number of polio cases has been driven down from 350,000 in 1988 to 1,243 last year.
The health agency’s target of eradicating the disease by 2000 was narrowly missed, as persistent clusters in Asia and a recent surge in Africa frustrated further attempts to stifle polio.
The WHO has blamed the surge on an 11-month ban on a polio vaccine in Nigeria until July 2004, which also allowed transmission to neighboring countries where there were low immunization rates.
It has since spread eastward across the continent to Sudan, where the number of cases accelerated from none to 112 within nine months last year, according to the UN’s health agency.
African and Asian countries have intensified mass immunization campaigns reaching hundreds of thousands of children.
