As a seven-year-old boy is treated for polio at a hospital in Malawi, the country has launched a major vaccination campaign to stem an outbreak of the disease.
The effort in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries and badly hit by the aid cuts, has seen an astonishing 1.3 million children already vaccinated against the disease in just four days after emergency supplies were airlifted in by the World Health Organization (WHO) just over a week ago.
Malawi declared the outbreak after the virus was detected in two “environmental samples” taken from two sewage plants in Blantyre, the country’s second-largest city and where the only known victim lives.
double quotation mark I don’t know much about the vaccine. I am also not interested … I feel my child has had enough vaccines in her life Frida Seva
A single case of polio is considered dangerous, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates, because it is a highly infectious virus that spreads silently and as many people have very mild symptoms. It causes permanent, irreversible paralysis or death in a small but significant percentage of cases, especially in children. Malawi has not had a case of wild poliovirus since 2022.
It is the latest setback to the global efforts to eradicate polio, something that had seemed tantalisingly close 28 years ago, when there were just 2,880 cases remaining in 20 countries thanks to a vaccine given as drops into a child’s mouth. But the virus has remained stubbornly persistent in some of the most remote parts of the world.
View image in fullscreen Health workers prepare to administer oral polio vaccines to children in Blantyre’s Ndirande township last week.
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