Polio cases begins to spread, 'more vaccinations needed'
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Polio has started to spread to the previously unaffected province of Central Java, where at least one case has been found less than a week before the second round of a mass polio immunization drive, health officials reported on Wednesday.
They said a child in Demak regency has tested positive to the crippling virus.
"Our team and the WHO (World Health Organization) are currently investigating the case reported by our provincial surveillance team," Ministry of Health director general for disease control and environmental health I Nyoman Kandun told The Jakarta Post.
The new case, the first outside West Java and Banten where an index case was discovered in April, brings the number of children infected by polio to 51 as of June 20.
In cooperation with the WHO, the Ministry of Health conducted the first round of a mass polio vaccination program in the neighboring provinces of West Java, Jakarta and Banten on May 31. The second round of a similar drive is scheduled for June 28 to fully protect children from the imported wild virus, which Indonesia had been declared free from in 1995.
Kandun said the health ministry needed to hold a further investigation to determine whether the virus in Demak spread from the West Java town of Sukabumi, where the polio outbreak began.
"It (the virus) could have been carried to the area due to the high mobility of population," he said, adding that there was little possibility that it was an indigenous virus. "Indonesia has not seen such any wild indigenous virus since 2002."
Such a finding has prompted the health ministry to schedule another set of polio immunization campaigns in Central Java, Yogyakarta, Lampung and South Sumatra provinces, apart from the three provinces where the previous anti-polio drive was carried out recently.
"The WHO has suggested that we carry out immunization in seven provinces as early as July," Kandun said. "But it means that we will have to import vaccines because Biofarma does not have sufficient stocks."
He said his office was temporarily planning to carry out a campaign in August and September to protect at least 12 million children aged below five years from polio.
"That way, we do not have to import the vaccines since Biofarma can supply them by then," he said, adding that the planned program would require between 32 and 36 million doses of vaccines. "If our logistics run smoothly, we will expand the campaign to include East Java."
Ideally, Kandun said, vaccination should be carried out simultaneously nationwide, but such a program would cost large amounts of money.
"In the last PIN (national immunization campaign) in 1995, we spent Rp 100 billion on it," he said, adding that the health ministry was still calculating the budget for the upcoming anti- polio campaigns.
Kandun appealed to parents to have their children immunized during the second round of the campaign on June 28 as the first two doses, dispensed in May, would only protect them for up to 100 days.(003)