Africa has achieved a huge milestone in global health by going a full year since reporting a case of polio, a disease the continent has been battling for years.
The poliomyelitis virus attacks the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours of infection. Africa's goal of eradicating the disease has been in the offing for a while now, but cases of polio continued to be reported from somewhere across the continent, especially Nigeria, the one country where the virus had never been eradicated, even temporarily.
The last African case of polio was detected in Somalia on Aug. 11 of last year, but the last case in Nigeria was recorded on July 24, 2014, a situation which has given health workers a reason to cheer.
"This is a big success, but it's still fragile. There's always a worry that there could be an undetected case in a population you're not reaching," said Dr. Hamid Jafari, the initiative's World Health Organization (WHO) director, according to Today Online.
Nigeria celebrated its polio-free year on July 25 with a modest tree-planting ceremony in which Muhammadu Buhari, the country's new president, was photographed putting vaccine drops into the mouth of his infant granddaughter. The campaign was subdued because it "did not want to send out the wrong message to political officeholders and donors that polio has been eradicated," said Dr. Faisal Shuaib, a Health Ministry official, The New York Times reported.
Apart from battling polio, many nations of the continent have been fighting Islamist militant groups al-Shabaab and Boko Haram. Experts are worried that vaccines will not reach children displaced by conflict, according to The Guardian.
"I just hope Boko Haram will not be the achilles heel of our work. Unless we get rid of the insurgency, we cannot be sure we will eradicate polio," said Oyewale Tomori, professor of virology at the Nigerian Academy of Science, who has dedicated four decades of his life to polio research.
