POST 01348E: VACCINATION RATES AND POLIO OUTBREAK

POST 01348E: VACCINATION RATES AND POLIO OUTBREAK FOLLOW-UP ON POSTS 01339E, 01341E, 013342E, 01343E, 01344E, 01345E & 01346E 9 NOVEMBER 2008 ****************************************** Dear Mogens Munck, If you look up the geographical distribution of Wild-Polio virus type I cases on http://www.polioeradication.org/content/general/casemap.shtml you will see that most of the cases are from two regions—one in Western UP in India and the other in North-Central Nigeria. (The map scale is too large to identify clusters.) In Nigeria, most of these cases are from the six provinces of Bauchi, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina and Zamfara as reported in http://www.polioeradication.org/casecount.asp. Of these Kano and Zamfara together account for 50% of cases this year in Nigeria. In Kano alone 33% of children have never been vaccinated. Therefore an outbreak amongst these 'zero dose' children is going to be due to the same virus type (type I in this case). The present outbreak of Wild Polio Virus Type 1 in Nigeria seems more likely to be due to failure of vaccination drive and not because of failure of the tOPV vaccine. It is however debatable and I am trying to look up if WHO has some specific data for it. The scenario in Western UP in India still needs to be addressed and vaccination rates in this area need to be checked so as the reason may be ascertained. Nevertheless, a recent mOPV type 1 vaccination drive was carried out in this region, which hints that the cases here would be due to vaccination failures rather than 'zero dose' children. Dr Prabhjot Singh ([[email protected]][email protected][/email]) MBBS, MPH (EPI) 2009 Candidate Saint Louis University Post generated using Mail2Forum (http://www.mail2forum.com)