Polio in Indonesia; First Time in Decade

By MICHAEL CASEY, Associated Press Writer
5 minutes ago (Article from Yahoo! News and Associated Press)

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesia has detected its first case of polio in a decade, prompting the government to launch a massive vaccination campaign that is expected to inoculate more than 5 million children, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

A 20-month-old girl was diagnosed with polio on April 21. Authorities said they believe she came in contact with a migrant worker or tourist who had contracted the disease outside the country. The case — the first since 1995 — prompted government health workers to do house-to-house vaccinations in four neighboring villages. They hope to vaccinate 5.2 million children under age 5 by July.

"A case of polio has been detected in Indonesia," said Dr. Bardan Rana, a WHO medical officer investigating the case. "This is an imported case. Somebody must have brought it in, spread around and then the person came in contact with the child."

Indonesia is the latest polio-free country to find a new case. Since 2003, 15 other previously polio-free countries have reported new cases, after a vaccine boycott in Nigeria was blamed for causing an outbreak that spread the disease to other countries.

Rana said he expected to see a few more cases in Indonesia but said that the government was doing everything necessary to contain the disease found in the West Java village of Girijaya.

"The surveillance has been very good," Rana said. "The immediate response was very good. It was done in a very short time."

Hard-line Islamic clerics in northern Nigeria led the 2003 immunization boycott, claiming that the polio vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot to render Nigeria's Muslims infertile or infect them with AIDS. Vaccination programs restarted in Nigeria in July 2004 after local officials ended the 11-month boycott.

Polio then re-emerged in Sudan, where it had been eradicated in 2001, and the strain was traced to Nigeria. The disease has infected 149 people in Sudan.

The Nigerian polio strain then spread to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, but vaccination campaigns averted major outbreaks in those countries.

The virus also spread to other African and Middle Eastern countries — Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Togo and Yemen.

Polio is still endemic in Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt.

Last year, some 1,267 people were infected in the world — with 792 of those in Nigeria. The total new cases of April 29 stood at 110, according to WHO.

When WHO launched its anti-polio campaign in 1988, the worldwide case count was more than 350,000 annually.

Polio is a waterborne disease that usually infects young children, attacking the nervous system and causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and sometimes death.