Press Release

NIGERIA IMMUNIZES OVER 30 MILLION CHILDREN

2 March 2006

By Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga

More than 30 million children received the oral polio vaccine during National Immunization Days in Nigeria, held 11-14 February.

The event was the first of four NIDs and two Subnational Immunization Days recommended by an expert review committee that convened in Abuja, Nigeria's federal capital, in mid-December, to explore new approaches to polio eradication this year.

"Nigerian Rotarians have declared the year 2006 as 'End-Time for Polio in Nigeria,' and this is now the battle cry of the nation itself," says Nigeria PolioPlus Committee member Busuyi Onabolu. "[We] are therefore geared for this final battle and are now working at the community, wards, local government, state, and even national levels, lobbying the political leadership to release funds for the program."

According to Onabolu, Rotarians are also leading efforts to mobilize the public, supervise and monitor immunization teams, and provide logistical support during NIDs.

A month before the February NIDs, the National Programme on Immunization (NPI), the agency in charge of planning and coordinating all immunization activities in Nigeria, organized a retreat to discuss ways to achieve polio eradication in 2006. Part of this year's target is to increase routine immunization coverage to 65 percent of the population for all vaccine preventable diseases.

As in past NIDs, children in all of Nigeria's 36 states and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, were targeted. But for the first time, the monovalent oral polio vaccine (mOPV1) was used on a pilot basis in Kebbi, Lagos, Rivers, and Taraba states.

"There was no negative report from the four states where mOPV1 was administered," says Onabulo. "It will, therefore, be administered in all the 36 states and Abuja during the second round of NIDs in March."

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative announced on 1 February that mOPV1 will be the vaccine of choice in all polio-affected areas this year. Aimed at individual virus strains, mOPV1 is the most effective vaccine against poliovirus types 1 and 3, which are circulating in countries where polio is still endemic or imported.

Nigerian media have recently reported that President Olusegun Obasanjo is unhappy that the country is still polio-endemic.
According to This Day, a daily newspaper based in Lagos, NPI's new chief executive, Edugie Abebe, told journalists at a news briefing in early February that "Obasanjo was disturbed by the classification of Nigeria as the largest reservoir of wild poliovirus in Africa."

The same newspaper reported that the Nigerian president has directed the NPI to aim at halting transmission of the wild poliovirus before the end of 2006 by carrying out agency reforms, through better planning and coordination, and by mobilizing elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels of government to be more involved in polio-immunization activities.