Mozambican health authorities announced Tuesday that they had hospitalized a suspected case of polio in the center of the country, in a teenager who had paralyzed limbs.
The case was detected in the coastal district of Inhassunge, Zambézia province, and confirmation depends on the results of ongoing laboratory tests.
The Mozambican Ministry of Health is mobilizing resources to carry out a third round of childhood polio vaccination this year.
The first round was launched in March, after a case of polio was detected in neighboring Malawi in February.
The second phase of vaccination began in April, with a total of 4.2 million children covered and with one case of polio confirmed in Tete, a province in the interior of central Mozambique that borders Malawi. This Tete case was confirmed in May and was the first in Mozambique since 1992.
Genomic sequencing analysis allowed the infection to be associated with a variant that circulated in Pakistan in 2019, as was the case with the case reported by Malawi in February.
The World Health Organization (WHO) clarified that the two cases do not affect the certification that declares Africa free of wild poliovirus (as of August 2020) because the virus variant is not native.
Globally, wild poliovirus is endemic in Afghanistan and no Pakistan.
Poliomyelitis is an infectious disease with no cure that mainly affects children under five years of age and can only be prevented with a vaccine.
In some cases, it can cause limb paralysis.
“Children around the world remain at risk of contracting wild polio if the virus is not eradicated in the last areas where it still circulates”WHO has warned.
Source: Observadora
