Somalia hadn’t had a case of polio for nearly six years. But in the past few months the East African country has the worst polio outbreak anywhere in the world.
Twenty new cases of polio were identified this week by the Global Polio Eradication. That brings the total number of cases in the Horn of Africa to 73. The rest of the world combined has tallied only 59 cases so far this year.
Health workers are worried that the virus could gain a foothold in the Horn of Africa and jeopardize the multibillion-dollar effort to wipe out the virus worldwide. Last year the number of children paralyzed by polio hit a record low at 223.
This year it was looking like there were going to be even fewer cases. The last significant pockets of the virus appeared to be isolated in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.
Then in May, 2-year-old girl in Mogadishu became the first confirmed case of polio in Somalia in more than six years.
The number of polio cases in Somalia is increasing by the day, says Dr. Nasir Yusuf, who leads UNICEF’s immunization efforts in eastern and southern Africa.
In response to this, there have been five emergency polio immunization campaigns in Somalia since May. The women had been working in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, where eight new polio cases were in May.
The current outbreak is forcing governments throughout the region, including parts of the Middle East, to launch supplemental vaccination drives, Yusuf says, because polio is capable of spreading quickly.
“After a week, one of the viruses got into the Somali refugee camp in the most eastern part of Kenya,” he says. “So that tells you how fast this virus made it.”
The virus reproduces inside the human gut, and many people carry it but show no symptoms. This gives the virus the opportunity to travel long distances inside people and then get shed into the environment through feces.
The World Health Organization traced the poliovirus in Somalia to one in West Africa. Nigeria is the only place there where polio is still endemic.
The Somali outbreak is now forcing UNICEF, the WHO and other international agencies to dedicate vast resources to boost polio vaccination coverage throughout East Africa and parts of the Middle East. Those are resources that can’t be used to attack the virus in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — which appeared, until now, to be the last few places where polio had a foothold.