Uganda

Status: imported poliovirus

Uganda 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.

Polio this week in the Horn of Africa

One new WPV case was reported in the past week (WPV1 from a refugee camp in Dadaab, north-eastern Kenya), with onset of paralysis on 30 April. It is the first WPV in Kenya since July 2011, and it follows last week’s confirmation of a WPV1 case from Somalia (onset of paralysis 18 April).
The child is a four-month-old girl. Two healthy contacts of the child tested positive for WPV1.
Dadaab hosts several large refugee camps, housing nearly 500,000 people from across the Horn of Africa, including from Somalia.
An emergency outbreak response is being planned, to reach nearly 440,000 children aged less than 15 years across Dadaab, beginning on 26 May, using bivalent OPV. Further campaigns are planned across a wider area, including parts of Nairobi, on 9 June, followed by large-scale subnational immunization days (SNIDs) in late June.
In Somalia, an outbreak response immunization activity was held last week (14-16 May), to reach 350,000 children across Banadir region (including Mogadishu), with further activities across Banadir and other regions planned for 26-29 May and again in early June.
Immunization campaigns are also planned in other areas of the Horn of Africa, notably Ethiopia and Yemen, to urgently boost population immunity levels and minimize the risk of spread of the outbreak. Countries across the Horn of Africa are at significant risk, due to large-scale population movements and persistent immunity gaps in some areas. In 2005, polio spread across the African continent, and into Yemen and the Horn of Africa, resulting in over 700 cases. The adoption of international outbreak response guidelines and the development of new vaccines since then, have – when fully implemented – considerably reduced the severity and duration of such outbreaks.

Horn of Africa

8th Meeting of the Technical Advisory Group on Polio Eradication for the Horn of Africa
06-07 September 2012, Nairobi, Kenya
Report [pdf]

7th Meeting of the Technical Advisory Group on Polio Eradication for the Horn of Africa
08-09 February 2012, Nairobi, Kenya
Report [pdf]

6th Meeting of the Technical Advisory Group on Polio Eradication for the Horn of Africa
04-05 May 2011, Nairobi, Kenya
Report [pdf]

5th Meeting of the Technical Advisory Group on Polio Eradication for the Horn of Africa
08-09 March 2010, Nairobi, Kenya
Report [pdf]