New polio vaccine hope for Nigeria

Fourfold strength polio vaccine could eradicate disease in Nigeria, researchers claim

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Thursday, 16, Oct 2008 01:26

New research has claimed that a polio vaccine four times more effective than currently available could eradicate type one polio in Nigeria.

The west African country remains one of the four countries with India and Afghanistan and Pakistan still infected with polio throughout the world.

Nigeria this year alone is responsible for 82 per cent of all of the global cases.

Helen Jenkins, the corresponding author of the study from the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London, said: "Nigeria [is] responsible for the vast majority of new global polio cases... we now have an effective vaccine to use and we've seen the start of improvements in vaccine uptake."

Earlier this May, Nigeria's minister of health, Hassan Lawal, said that the Nigerian government was working to solve the problem.

"The federal government of Nigeria has planned a number of strategies. First and foremost, social mobilisation by disseminating information and campaigns to go to people about immunisation. It is very aggressively being done."

Polio poses the biggest threat to children, especially children under the age of five.

The highly infectious disease spreads through contaminated food, drinking water and faeces.

Dr Jenkins, publishing her findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, added: "These last pockets of unvaccinated children now need to be reached to achieve elimination in Nigeria and this in turn will have a dramatic impact on the prospects of worldwide eradication."

This oral vaccine, mOPV1, gives a child a 67 per cent chance of protected against type one paralytic poliomyelitis (type one polio). Even of the vaccine proves successful, for complete eradication doctors still need many more children to be vaccinated.

Roughly 90 per cent of polio cases show no symptoms. Symptoms do show in some cases; polio can cause inflammation of the brain, high fever, neck stiffness, and in some extreme cases paralysis.

Of the three strains of polio, mOPV1 targets type one polio, which is the most common. Before the mOPVI vaccination, doctors used a trivalent vaccine, which fights all three types. Trivalent vaccinations were four times less effective than mOPV, because the different strains intervene with one another inside the body.