Vaccination key to quelling polio threat

Vaccination key to quelling polio threat

Agencies, Jakarta

The recent polio outbreak that has infected hundreds of Indonesians poses a global health threat and planned vaccination drives are crucial to averting a crisis, the UN's children's agency said on Tuesday.

According to the World Health Organization, polio cases in Indonesia have increased to 225, with authorities reporting the country's first adult victim of the crippling disease.

Most of the victims came from parts of Java island, where there have been many reported cases already, WHO representative for Indonesia said in a statement.

Spokesperson for the WHO representative Sari Setiogi said the only adult victim, a 25-year-old male, became the fourth victim from Jakarta.

"The incident shows how serious and rapid the polio virus can harm human life," she said. "Therefore, as there is no cure for polio, immunization is the only way to prevent someone being exposed to the virus."

The government in April detected its first case of polio since 1995. The virus is believed to have returned via Saudi Arabia, either through migrant workers or Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, who may have passed on a strain of the virus originating in Nigeria.

The archipelagic nation is the 16th to be reinfected by the virus in the past year but has recorded the highest rate of new cases, posing concerns about it spreading from here to other corners of the world, said UNICEF's David Hipgrave.

"In Indonesia's case, because it's such an enormous country, because the outbreak has been quite substantial ... there's an enormous concern that if the virus is established here (it) will become an exporter of the virus to other countries, in the region or globally," he told AFP on Tuesday.

Indonesian laborers and fishermen traveling to Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and the Middle East, often informally, could pass on the virus to those areas, he warned.

"People are very concerned that if the virus is reestablished here it will become a regional risk and potentially a global risk."

Separately Hipgrave told a press briefing that the approaching rainy season meant there was a small window of opportunity to vaccinate some 24 million children aged under five against the waterborne virus.

Massive countrywide vaccination drives are planned for Aug. 30 and Sept. 27. An initial drive saw more than 6.5 million children receive immunizations but a second drive only reached 5.5 million.

The falloff occurred due to rumors about the safety of the vaccine and media coverage surrounding "coincident" deaths which happened at the time of the first round, said Hipgrave, chief of UNICEF's health and nutrition unit.

"There was not enough community outreach and there was, as a result, a backlash of loss of trust in the public," he said.

Some 245,000 immunization posts around the country will be set up for the next two rounds.

"It's an enormous effort, it costs a lot of money and involves a lot of people and really needs the highest levels of support," he said.

"We're really looking at the reintroduction of polio to a region, not just to one country. And there's no reason why if polio is reestablished here, Indonesia won't become an exporting country in the same way that Nigeria was an exporter of the virus in 2003 and 2004."

An epidemic would "affect people's confidence in the health service, it might affect people's confidence in government," he added.

A 17-year global program costing US$4 billion and involving 20 million volunteers has led to two billion children being immunized against the virus, which can cause paralysis, muscular atrophy and death.

The country's outbreak dealt a major blow to United Nations plans to eliminate the waterborne disease by the end of 2005.