CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – The World Health Organization said Wednesday it had declared a polio epidemic after the virus was detected in a child living in Mozambique’s Tete region. ).
The WHO said the case, which marked the second imported case of wild polio virus in South Africa this year after an outbreak in Malawi in February, was detected in the child who started showing paralysis in late March.
Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s regional director for Africa, said in a statement: “The detection of another case of wild polio virus in Africa is very worrying… It shows how dangerous this virus is and how quickly it can spread.” Said.
Polio invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours. There is no cure, but infection can be prevented with vaccination. A drastic reduction in cases worldwide in recent years is due to intense national and regional immunization campaigns in infants and children.
WHO is supporting large-scale vaccines targeting millions of children in southern Africa to prevent the spread of the virus, which was declared native wild polio-free in 2020 after eradicating all forms of the virus in the wild in Africa.
The WHO suggested that the genomic sequencing was linked to the newly confirmed case, a strain that began circulating in Pakistan in 2019, similar to the case reported in Malawi this year.
source: Noticias
