Polio cases soar to 179

The number of confirmed polio cases in Yemen has soared to 179 as a massive immunisation campaign gets underway on Monday, the Yemeni Public Health and Population Minister, Dr Mohammed al-Nomee, announced in the capital, Sana. The polio outbreak in Yemen was confirmed in mid May after 18 cases were reported, following the completion of a routine national immunisation programme conducted in April. "The number of confirmed polio cases has reached 179 across 11 provinces. The governorate of Hodeidah [226 km in the west] was the worst affected area with 134 cases," al-Nomee told IRIN on Sunday. The minister said that his department along with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) would start a three-day nationwide vaccination. This sweep will be the first of two-rounds and will target some 5 million children below the age of five using some six million vaccination doses. Yemen's Ministry of Health (MoH), along with UNICEF and the WHO, is promoting awareness through the media, schools, mosques and community leaders to motivate parents to bring their children in for vaccination. More than 36,000 workers are set to participate in the house-to-house programme. "The number of polio cases could increase to 200, as many more suspected cases are still being investigated," WHO representative for Yemen, Dr Hashim Al-Zain said. He denied there were conflicting reports about the number of cases in the country. According to the health minister, the results showed that of the examined samples, 76 cases had tested negative. The worst affected governorates were reportedly in Hodeidah in the west, Sana and Taiz in the south, along with Hadramawt in the east and Amran in the north. Al-Nomai and UNICEF communications coordinator, Naseem Ur-Rehman, denied reports that the reason for the increase in cases was caused by a lack of safe vaccines. "The safety of the vaccines is completely ensured from their entrance to the country to their delivery to the children's mouths," Ur-Rehman told IRIN. He urged the media to contribute to making the campaign a success. Dr al-Nomee, the health minister, called on the media to convey the truth and not report rumours about unsafe vaccines. "This is really not good as it scares people. This makes our campaign very difficult and helps exacerbate the disease," he said. It has been reported that the crippling disease spread from Nigeria to 12 other African countries, including Sudan. From there, a case was imported to Saudi Arabia, health officials said. "I think this virus was definitely brought to Yemen, because we had no problem [with polio] for the last six years. If the virus was indigenous we would have seen it within the last six years," the Yemeni health official explained earlier. Polio is a highly infectious viral disease which invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a matter of hours. There are only six countries in the world considered polio-endemic: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt. A total of 1,266 cases of polio were reported world-wide in the year 2004, according to the WHO. Yemen was designated polio free by WHO in 1996.