Africa has been declared free from the wild poliovirus, a debilitating disease which has no cure and bends children’s limbs into spider-like contortions, paralysing them for life.
The news comes after decades of tireless work by a coalition of international health bodies, governments, millions of community health workers and volunteers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) certified that the African continent is free from wild polio on Tuesday afternoon, four years after the last cases appeared in a conflict-ridden region of northeastern Nigeria.
“Thanks to the relentless efforts by governments, donors, frontline health workers and communities, up to 1.8 million children have been saved from the crippling life-long paralysis,” the WHO said in a statement.
Poliomyelitis, or “wild polio” is an acutely infectious disease which often passes through contaminated water and attacks the spinal cord, causing irreversible paralysis in children.
The virus was endemic across the world until a vaccine was found in 1952 by the American physician Jonas Salk.
The mass vaccination of children eradicated the virus in North America and Western Europe decades ago, but wild polio has lived on in some of the most remote and impoverished corners Africa and Asia.
Up until 1996, poliovirus paralysed more than 75,000 children every year, across the African continent.
Nelson Mandela launched the “Kick Polio Out of Africa” programme in 1996, which mobilised millions of health care workers who traipsed through rural communities administering hundreds of millions of vaccines , often in dangerous areas overrun by militias and extremist groups.
Nigeria, with its large population of 200m people, has been the continent’s virus trouble spot. Vaccination distribution campaigns in the country's impoverished northeast were stopped in 2003 and 2004 because of a campaign by Islamists, who claimed the vaccinations were part of a conspiracy to make young Muslims infertile.
The fight against polio in Nigeria was hit harder still when the terrorist group Boko Haram emerged in 2009. The extremist group has waged a brutal ten-year-long war against the Nigerian government.
The conflict has killed more than 30,000 people and displaced 2.6m people, including 1.5m children around Nigeria’s Borno State and in the wider Lake Chad region.
Four new cases of wild polio were discovered in Borno state in 2016. But now through a tremendous effort working with religious leaders and traditional chiefs, health care workers convinced the population that the vaccine was safe and has officially eradicated the virus.
“People trust their local traditional leaders who live with them more than the political leaders,” Grema Mundube, a community leader in the town of Monguno, in the far north of Nigeria, told AFP news agency. “Once we spoke to them and they saw us immunising our children they gradually accepted the vaccine.”
More than 95 per cent of the African continent’s population have been immunised against the disease. Now the last remanding cases of wild polio are in Afghanistan and remote tribal areas of Pakistan. In 2018 there were less than 30 recorded cases in the two countries.
However, every year Africa still suffers hundreds of cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus, which spreads through communities where immunisation figures are low.
“It was a long and tortuous journey,” Professor Oyewale Tomori, who helped spearhead Nigeria’s response to polio, told The Telegraph. "A mix of self inflicted obstacles and unexpected and unanticipated challenges. But we overcame with a renewed determination as a nation to succeed and we did.
“None of our children will suffer the plague of polio. But we are not free until every country is free. That it is not beyond our reach if we set our mind to achieve it, no matter how hard or how long it takes.”
Endemic transmission of wild poliovirus is continuing to cause cases in border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Failure to stop polio in these last remaining areas could result in as many as 200 000 new cases every year, according to the WHO.
Quite apart from the health benefits, the global eradication of polio would bring major economic gains. Economic modelling has found that the eradication of polio would save at least US$ 40–50 billion, mostly in low-income countries.
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