WHO: Polio Cases in Yemen Jump to 179

Tuesday, May 31st 2005, 10:33 am

By: News On 6

GENEVA (AP) _ The number of confirmed cases of polio in Yemen has reached 179, including 71 new cases in less than a week, but a vaccination campaign launched last week should be able to bring the outbreak under control, the U.N. health agency said Tuesday.

Dr. David Heyman, the World Health Organization's polio chief, said the agency had anticipated a jump in cases.

``We had anticipated there would be increasing numbers of cases, so this is not a surprise,'' he told The Associated Press.

The WHO called the Yemen outbreak a major epidemic last Wednesday when it said the number of polio cases had risen to 108, and that it was investigating hundreds more suspected cases.

``It is a major epidemic, but with the monovalic vaccine it will come under control within a short period of time,'' Heyman said Tuesday.

He said the immunization drive in Yemen _ which until April was believed to be polio-free _ should be able to ``break the back of polio'' with a new, more effective vaccine.

Older vaccines were designed to combat each of the three types of polio in existence but were less effective against the Type I virus present in Yemen, Heyman said. The new ``monovalic'' vaccine is designed specifically for Type I polio and can immunize up to 20 percent more children after a single dose and up to 100 percent after repeated vaccination, he said.

Type I polio spreads more easily and is more widespread than Type II or Type III variants, but is easier to detect, Heyman said. There have been no new cases of Type II since it was successfully eradicated in 1999 and Type III has become increasingly rare, he said.

Yemen is one of 16 previously polio-free countries that has reported new cases since 2003 after a vaccine boycott in Nigeria was blamed for causing an outbreak that spread the disease to other countries.

Hard-line Islamic clerics in northern Nigeria led the immunization boycott, claiming the polio vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot to render Nigeria's Muslims infertile or infect them with AIDS. Vaccination programs restarted in Nigeria in July 2004 after local officials ended the 11-month boycott.

Last year, some 1,267 people were infected in the world _ 792 of them in Nigeria. The total new cases in 2005 stands at 326, according to WHO, with Yemen the worst-affected country.

Measures also are being undertaken to ensure that neighboring countries still believed to be polio-free are not affected by the Yemeni outbreak, Heyman said.

``They've begun to vaccinate intensely in the border areas of Oman, which is polio-free,'' Heyman said. ``In Somalia and Djibouti, as well, vaccinations are being done.''

Polio comes from dirty water and usually infects young children, attacking the nervous system and causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and sometimes death.

When WHO launched its anti-polio campaign in 1988, the worldwide case count was more than 350,000 annually. WHO hopes to eradicate the disease globally by the end of 2005.