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Eastern Africa polio-free again

August 01, 2010 Edition 1

GENEVA: Eastern Africa is free of polio again, with four countries - Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda - having reported no cases of the crippling disease for more than a year, UN and other aid agencies said on Friday.

But the virus appears to have spread from Tajikistan, where it paralysed 437 children since April, to infect six ethnic Tajiks in Russia, according to the World Health Organisation.

"It was detected in a few individuals in Russia in Tajik communities. An investigation is going on, we don't know where infection took place," WHO spokesman Oliver |Rosenbauer said.

Russia's last confirmed case of polio was in 1996, but if the investigation shows the victims were infected in Tajikistan, they would be classified as part of the epidemic there, he said.

And in another setback to the elusive two-decades-old bid to wipe out polio worldwide, a single known case in the Democratic Republic of Congo may have been imported from Angola, which also has an outbreak, according to the WHO.

Aid agencies are trying to limit further international spread of polio and stop new outbreaks more rapidly. - Reuters