PARIS: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has directed its campaign globally to remain suspended.
According to an international wire service, the head of GPEI has issued the directive for the first time in 30 years.
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The pandemic has caused travel restrictions imposed by most countries owing to which health workers associated with immunization drives are unable to reach target areas. GPEI has warned thatx this could give rise to resurgence of the poliovirus along with the trial of COVID-19.
“We’re devastated by the fact that we have to stop the activities for a disease that we were working so hard to eradicate,” said the World Health Organisation’s Michel Zaffran, who heads GPEI.
Pakistan is among the two nations where the wild strain of poliovirus still thrives. The other is Afghanistan. GPEI supported immunization vaccine provide protection against both wild and vaccine-derived outbreaks of the virus, which spreads in areas of poor sanitation and contaminated water and can cause irreversible paralysis. Children under five are particularly vulnerable.
GPEI announced last week said it would halt immunisations until at least June, but Zaffran said it was impossible to predict when the campaigns can resume and decisions will be made on a country-by-country basis.
“Many of these activities have been suspended because they bring people together, they increase the mass gathering effect and also the delivery of the vaccine uses a dropper which could actually get contaminated, either by the recipients, or by the health worker,” he said.
A devastating disease that the world had come achingly close to snuffing out will be free to spread. Zaffran said that it is a grave concern for GPEI that the poliovirus could now start to advance again within Afghanistan and Pakistan and warned that in Africa it could cross borders into countries currently unaffected.
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