Africa declared free of wild polio

It left millions of people paralysed and forced them to use iron lungs to survive. Now wild poliovirus has been eradicated from Afria.

Poliovirus is a simple RNA virus 30 nm in diameter. Poliovirus causes poliomyelitis.

The World Health Organisation has declared Africa is free of the virus that causes polio, a major landmark in the long campaign to eradicate the disease.

“Today is a historic day for Africa,” said Professor Rose Gana Fomban Leke, whose commission certified that no polio cases had occurred on the continent for the past four years, the threshold for eradication.

Poliovirus now joins smallpox on the list of viruses that have been wiped out in Africa, according to the WHO said.

Poliovirus is a simple RNA virus 30 nm in diameter. Poliovirus causes poliomyelitis.

A health worker administers polio vaccine drops to a child during a polio vaccination door-to-door campaign in Lahore on August 16, 2020. (Photo by Arif ALI / AFP)

The declaration leaves Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan as the only countries thought to still have the wild poliovirus, with vaccination efforts against the highly infectious, waterborne disease complicated by insecurity and attacks on health workers, the New York Post reported.

Health authorities see the declaration as a rare glint of good news in Africa amid the coronavirus pandemic, an Ebola outbreak in western Congo and the persistent deadly challenges of malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. “This is an incredible and emotional day,” WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said, but she urged vigilance as the coronavirus threatens vaccination and surveillance effort.

Poliovirus is often spread from person to person through infected fecal matter entering the mouth.

The United Nations says eradication efforts have prevented 1.8 million children from contracting the disease that causes crippling and lifelong paralysis and saved about 180,000 lives.

The disease was endemic until a vaccine was found in the 1950s.

There is no cure for polio.