Polio vaccination campaigns often run alongside other health programmes, such as the distribution of mosquito nets. Pictured: Administering the Polio vaccine in Chaman, Pakistan When Nigeria’s first Ebola case was confirmed in Lagos in July 2014, the health authorities needed to act swiftly and decisively to prevent an outbreak spreading in Africa’s most populous city. To prevent an epidemic, they would have to trace all potential contacts of the first case, continuously monitor all these contacts and rapidly quarantine all potentially infectious contacts. Immediately after the first case of Ebola was confirmed, Nigeria repurposed the polio vaccination infrastructure to trace other cases. The country’s emergency response resources to fight infectious diseases had been developed over several years in the fight against polio. When Ebola struck, Nigeria was prepared, with cutting-edge GPS and surveillance technology to track cases, a network of laboratories to test blood samples, and hundreds of well-trained health workers to treat patients and control the virus. With co-ordination from the country’s Emergency Operations Center (another structure created by the polio campaign), Nigeria’s health workers completed a remarkable 18,500 in-person visits to monitor the virus among a total of 989 identified contacts. By the end of October 2014, the WHO declared Nigeria free of Ebola transmission. Apart from thwarting the Ebola outbreak decisively, Nigeria has suffered no new polio cases for seven months and the African continent could be on the verge of ending polio. E s t a b l i s h i n g v a c c i n e i n f r a s t r u c t u r e Sharing best practice in South Asia India, once regarded as the toughest place on earth in which to eradicate polio, with sanitation challenges and high population density, was declared polio-free last year, freeing South-East Asia from the grip of the disease. Keen to strengthen cross-border coordination, India sent delegations of surveillance medical officers for deployment in Nigeria (for polio) and to Sierra Leone (for Ebola). It also hosted local health officials from Afghanistan to demonstrate best practice from its National Polio Surveillance project. Pakistan’s Emergency Operations Centers, developed in Pakistan to co-ordinate polio eradication activities, are based on Nigeria’s successful model of the centre. GPEI and Rotary workers are sensitising community and religious leaders about the benefits of the polio vaccine and gaining their backing. National Islamic leaders have issued dozens of fatwas promoting the safety of the polio vaccine and the importance of vaccinating children. The influential Ulema Mashaikh Council of leading religious scholars added its support to immunisation drives in Pakistan in March 2015, also issuing a fatwa in favour of immunisation. Cognisant of the need to mitigate the effects of conflict, instability and geographical isolation, the GPEI is installing vaccination posts (with the help of funding by Rotary) on the perimeter of insecure areas in Pakistan to target transient populations. Commonwealth Health Partnerships 2015 67 Asianet-Pakistan / Shutterstock.com
Commonwealth Health Partnerships 2015
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