How did a disease that had not been seen in the Asia-Pacific region for almost two decades suddenly reappear?
He was unable to walk or even stand up.
But in rare cases, the virus invades the nervous system, leaving one in 200 people with irreversible paralysis. The campaign has been hugely successful: polio cases have dropped more than 99 per cent globally, and all but two countries — Afghanistan and Pakistan — have been declared polio-free.'That's when we realised we had a problem'
As health officials worked to bring the outbreak under control, they were notified of another case across the Indonesian border in the disputed province of West Papua.By February 2019, the detection of two additional cases in children in the same region led Indonesian health authorities to declare that poliovirus was circulating.In September, health authorities in the Philippines discovered a three-year-old girl named Junaisa, who hadn't been able to stand up or walk on her own since June.
In December, a doctor in the state of Sabah, which shares a border with the Philippines, sounded the alarm."After that, we had three more children as well." This allows it to pick up a lot of genetic changes, and in rare instances, mutate into a form of the virus that can cause paralysis.where sanitation is poor and where the oral polio vaccine, or OPV, is still being used.
In PNG, vaccination rates were low, virus surveillance was weak, and sanitation was poor in areas like the one where Gafo lived."The recommended immunisation vaccination coverage for polio is 95 per cent," Dr Sheel says. The outbreaks in the Philippines and Malaysia weren't connected to PNG or Indonesia, but they were connected to one another.
Following the outbreaks, governments in each country launched mass vaccination campaigns to try to catch any children who'd missed out.
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