WHO's Oral Vaccine Sparks New Polio Outbreak In Africa
A week after World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that its decade-long vaccination campaign in Africa was successful, its own oral vaccine itself has sparked a new Polio outbreak in the continent. The outbreak has been caused by mutation of strain in vaccine.
WHO’s Oral Vaccine Sparks New Polio Outbreak In Africa
A new polio outbreak in Sudan has been linked to the oral polio vaccine that uses a weakened form of the virus.
News of the outbreak comes a week after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that wild polio had been eradicated in Africa.
The WHO linked the cases to a strain of the virus that had been noted circulating in Chad last year and warned that the risk of spread to other parts of the Horn of Africa was high.
In a statement on the new cases, the WHO said two children in Sudan, one from South Darfur state and the other from Gadarif state, close to the border with Ethiopia and Eritrea, were paralysed in March and April. Both had been recently vaccinated against polio.
The WHO said initial outbreak investigations showed the cases were linked to a continuing vaccine-derived outbreak in Chad that was first detected last year and is now spreading in Chad and Cameroon.
The vaccine-derived polio emerged soon after the announced eradication of wild polio in Africa. The outbreak has been caused by mutation of strain in vaccine.
In November last year, new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine were reported in four African countries. More children were being paralysed by vaccine-derived viruses than those infected by viruses in the wild, according to global health numbers.
Use of the oral polio vaccine was discontinued in the UK in 2004 and the US in 2000, and the UN agency advises that the use of the oral vaccine should be discontinued because of the risk of vaccine-derived outbreaks.
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