Four years after the appearance of the last cases in the north-east of Nigeria, a region devastated by a conflict against the jihadists of Boko Haram, the World Health Organization (WHO) must certify, this Tuesday, the African continent "exempt wild poliovirus ”.
"Thanks to the efforts of governments, health workers and communities, more than 1.8 million children have been saved" from this disease, the WHO said in a statement.
The "wild poliovirus" present in only two countries
The official announcement, via videoconference from 3 p.m. GMT, will bring together the Director-General of WHO, Ethiopia's Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, its Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, Nigerian billionaires and philanthropists Aliko Dangote and American Bill Gates. Caused by “wild poliovirus” (WPV), poliomyelitis is an acute infectious disease that mainly affects children, attacks the spinal cord and can cause irreversible paralysis.
It was endemic all over the world, until the discovery of a vaccine in the 1950s. The richest countries quickly had access to it, but Asia and Africa remained for a long time important centers of infection. In 1988, the WHO counted 350,000 cases throughout the world and more than 70,000 cases in Africa alone in 1996. But thanks to a rare collective awareness and to significant financial efforts (19 billion dollars out of 30 years), only two countries in the world are now infected with “wild poliovirus”: Afghanistan (29 cases in 2020) and Pakistan (58 cases).
Convince the populations
Epicenter of the disease in the world at the beginning of the 2000s, Nigeria, an African giant of 200 million inhabitants, was still very recently on their side. In the Muslim North, under pressure from Salafist circles, polio vaccination campaigns stopped between 2003 and 2004, rumored to be the tool of a vast international plot to sterilize Muslims. It took a lot of work with traditional and religious leaders to convince people to have their children vaccinated.
However, in 2009 the emergence of the conflict against Boko Haram dampened hopes of having finally eradicated the disease: in 2016, four new cases of polio were recorded in Borno State (North-East), home of the disease. jihadist insurgency. "At the time, around 400,000 children were beyond the reach of any medical campaign because of the violence," recalls Dr Funsho.
Nearly 30,000 "inaccessible children"
The security situation remains extremely volatile in northeastern Nigeria, where Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa (Iswap) group control large areas, particularly around Lake Chad. "But local authorities, humanitarian agencies and all partners have taken the bull by the horns to find solutions to reach these children," said Dr Musa Idowu Audu, WHO coordinator for Borno State.
In “partially accessible” areas, vaccination campaigns were carried out under the protection of the army and self-defense militias. In areas totally controlled by jihadists, WHO and its partners have approached populations on the roads or markets to create a network of “health informants” and “sentries” that can alert cases or potential epidemics. Today, it is estimated that only 30,000 children are still "inaccessible": a figure "too low" to ensure epidemic transmission, according to scientific experts.
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