Sometimes you just want to sit down and weep...
West Africa represents the biggest obstacle to completely eradicating polio on a global scale, the head of the United Nations' Children's Fund UNICEF warns. Carol Bellamy is calling on west African leaders to have all children in the region vaccinated by the end of next year to curb the fast spread of the disease. "Children need vision and decisiveness from their leaders to stop polio before the disease spreads out of control," she told the annual summit of the Community of West African States. Polio has become a political issue in Nigeria, where the central government is having to cope with hostility from Muslim religious leaders to a vaccination campaign in the three northern states of Kano, Kaduna and Zamfara.
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Nigeria overtook India this year to head the world's list of countries registering new cases of polio, with 268 case compared to 204 in India. These two countries and Pakistan have registered 95 per cent of the world's known polio cases, according to World Health Organisation statistics. The disease has started to spread from Nigeria and Niger, where 17 cases were registered this year, to contaminate the neighbouring states of Ghana, Burkina Faso, Chad and Togo. Polio had been declared eradicated in those countries. |