Health employees in Afghanistan will start a house-to-house polio vaccination drive subsequent month after the brand new Taliban authorities agreed to assist the marketing campaign, the World Health Organization and the United Nations kids’s company UNICEF stated on Monday.
Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan are the final nations on this planet with endemic polio, an incurable and extremely infectious illness transmitted by way of sewage that may trigger crippling paralysis in younger kids.
Polio has been nearly eradicated globally by way of a decades-long inoculation drive. But insecurity, inaccessible terrain, mass displacement and suspicion of out of doors interference have hampered mass vaccination in Afghanistan and a few areas of Pakistan.
The marketing campaign resulting from begin on Nov. 8 would be the first in additional than three years aimed toward all kids in Afghanistan, together with greater than 3 million in distant and beforehand inaccessible areas.
“This decision will allow us to make a giant stride in the efforts to eradicate polio,” Hervé Ludovic De Lys, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan, stated in a press release.
“To eliminate polio completely, every child in every household across Afghanistan must be vaccinated, and with our partners, this is what we are setting out to do,” he stated.
A second marketing campaign, resulting from start in coordination with a marketing campaign in Pakistan in December, has additionally been agreed.
According to figures compiled earlier than the collapse of the Western-backed authorities in August, there was one reported case of the one wild poliovirus kind 1 (WPV1) in Afghanistan in 2021, in contrast with 56 in 2020.
However till the illness is eradicated fully, it stays a risk to human well being in all nations, particularly these with weak well being methods due to the danger of importing the illness.
