The World Health Organization has called on partners across member states to continuously assist in Poliovirus eradication to achieve “zero dose” especially for children living in difficult terrain.
A statement by WHO on the celebration of the 2023 World Polio Day, let us renew our efforts to “Make Polio History”, in Africa.
It said the significant progress made on the threshold of polio eradication calls for more commitment by stakeholders to accelerate timely and effective interventions to the ongoing poliovirus outbreaks in the continent.
The statement noted that One case of polio is one too many, this year, we have seen a decrease in the number of detections in our region. From 438 circulating variant polio cases reported this time last year (end of September 2022) to 304 cases in the same period this year. This represents a decrease of 31% in the number of cases in the past 12 months.Moreover, we have seen no wild polio detections in our region in over a year.These results offer hope that the African Region will halt poliovirus circulation, to reach the global goal of polio eradication.In this last mile, however, we can’t rest on our laurels because 21 countries in the African Region are still experiencing circulating variant polio outbreaks at this very moment. Some of them are in areas that have not seen any previous circulation in decades.I reiterate the tremendous efforts made in each country of the African Region on delivering high-quality vaccination campaigns and routine immunization as critical steps towards our region’s path to polio eradication.
The celebration of World Polio Day is every 24th of October as WHO disclosed that Last year’s wild polio cases in Malawi and Mozambique were a reminder that until the world is wild polio-free, all countries and regions remain at risk.
