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Kenya

Status: imported poliovirus

Kenya is one of the countries in the “wild poliovirus importation belt” – a band of countries stretching from west Africa to central Africa and the Horn of Africa, which are recurrently re-infected with poliovirus originating from northern Nigeria. The immediate priority is to stop all active outbreaks using mop-up campaigns with monovalent oral polio vaccine in the infected areas, combined with a series of large-scale, synchronized supplementary immunization activities across most of the “importation belt” countries to protect against further importations.

Strategy

Global Polio Eradication Initiative Strategic Plan 2010–2012  

Polio campaign monitoring in Kenya

  
  

Polio this week in Kenya

  • One new WPV case was reported in the past week (WPV1 from Banadir, Somalia), with onset of paralysis on 18 April. It is the first WPV in Somalia since March 2007. It is the first outbreak outside of an endemic country in 2013.
  • The child is a 32-month-old girl from Banadir region.
  • An outbreak response activity is being conducted this week (14-16 May), to reach 350,000 children across Banadir (including Mogadishu). Further campaigns are being planned.
  • In large areas of south-central Somalia, immunization campaigns have not been implemented since 2009 due to inaccessibility, affecting more than 500,000 children aged <5 years. Populations in this area are at particular risk of this polio outbreak. This is also the area affected by an ongoing cVDPV2 outbreak, which has resulted in 18 cases in the country since 2009 (most recent cVDPV2 case had onset of paralysis on 9 January 2013).
  

News Stories and Press Releases for Kenya