WHO Plans Polio Vaccinations in Africa

The U.N. health agency plans to vaccinate nearly 3 million children in the Horn of Africa this year against polio, a crippling disease that experts fear could spread rapidly along the region's volatile and porous borders.

The campaign, which starts Saturday and runs through December, will target children under 5 in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

"Nomadic people move between these countries all the time, so the idea is to try to get to these children and protect them," Dr. Mohamed Dahir Duale, a Kenya-based doctor with the World Health Organization, said Friday.

Polio is a waterborne disease that usually infects children through contaminated drinking water, attacking the nervous system and causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and sometimes death. Last year, some 1,880 people were infected with polio worldwide.

Medical work in Africa often is hampered by violence and political uncertainty, and because the continent has vast tracts of rural, ungoverned land. Somalia, for example, has had no effective government for 15 years and no health care system.

"I urge the WHO to bring their message to rural areas as well," said Afrah Hassan Mo'allin, who was crippled by polio as a child and now lives in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. "Polio affected me when I was too young, and my parents were not city dwellers."

Dr. Mulugeta Abraham, polio coordinator for WHO-Somalia, said the new polio campaign will include work by local leaders and thousands of local volunteers, making access much easier.

Polio-free for almost three years, Somalia became re-infected in 2005 with a case in the capital, Mogadishu, which has degenerated into a huge, looted shanty town since warlords toppled longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

To date, there are 215 confirmed cases in Somalia, according to the WHO. Ethiopia has had 37 cases since December 2004 and Kenya has been polio-free for 22 years.

When WHO launched a $4 billion anti-polio campaign in 1988, the worldwide case count was more than 350,000 annually. WHO had hoped to eradicate the disease globally by the end of 2005, but missed that target in part because of a 2003 vaccine boycott in Nigeria.

Hard-line Islamic clerics there claimed 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.

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AP writer Mohamed Sheikh Nor contributed to this report from Mogadishu, Somalia.

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