Bangkok, May 16 (EFE) .- Papua New Guinea, an island nation in the Pacific, faces a national emergency for an outbreak of polyomyelitis (polio), the first in the country since 2018, with UN agencies and the Australian government involved in the response and vaccination process.
The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the outbreak on Friday and explained, in its X Specialized Poly, which works with the National Department of Papuano Health to “urgently stop propagation.”
The detection in two cases of this virus, highly infectious and that mainly affects children under 5 years of age, “has triggered the activation of an emergency national response to protect children from all over the country” with two rounds of antipoliomyelitic vaccination and families’ awareness, according to a statement from the United Nations Childhood Fund (UNICEF).
“Technical specialists have already been deployed in immunization, cold chain, promotion and change of social behavior nationwide and provincial,” said UNICEF representative in Papua New Guinea, Veera Mendonca.
Mendonca warned that “many children” are “in a situation of vulnerability” in front of the polio and urged to “increase systematic immunization” to protect children “in the long term.”
WHO alerted the outbreak after two children were diagnosed with the virus 18 years after the same organization declared “free of the disease” to Papua New Guinea, which recorded the last cases of this virus in 2018.
The disease was detected in an environmental sample of the capital of the country, Port Moresby, as well as in another sample of wastewater in the city of LAE, and the UN agencies, together with the Australian government, work to stop their expansion.
The virus is transmitted, according to WHO, from person to person, mainly by fecal-oral or, less frequently, by a common transmitter vehicle, such as contaminated water or foods, and multiplies in the intestine, from where you can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis.
One in 200 polio infections produces irreversible paralysis and between 5 % and 10 % of those affected die from respiratory muscles paralysis.
The cases caused by wild poliovirus have decreased by more than 99 % since 1988, when there were 350,000 cases in more than 125 countries with endemic polyomyelitis, which today persists only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to WHO.
“If polyomyelitis is not eradicated in these last last redoubts, the disease could reappear worldwide,” says WHO. EFEMCA/PAV/PDDP
