Maputo — The Mozambican health authorities on Wednesday declared a public health emergency following the confirmation of a case of wild polio virus (PVS1).
This case was confirmed on 14 May in a child in Changara district, in the western province of Tete.
“Faced with this situation, and as international health regulations recommend, we must declare a public health emergency, and strengthen measures of surveillance, and vaccination against polio”, declared the National Director of Public Health, Quinhas Fernandes, at a Maputo press conference.
Fernandes said that in February a case of wild polio virus was notified in Malawi. In response, the countries of the region, notably Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi itself decided to launch vaccination campaigns against polio.
Genetic sequencing, Fernandes added, show the close relation between the virus identified in the Changara child, and the case discovered in Malawi.
It was during Mozambique’s first round of polio vaccination, in April, that the suspect case was detected. It was then confirmed by a reference laboratory.
The vaccination campaign is about to enter its third round, and the Health Ministry is urging parents to take any unvaccinated children to the nearest vaccination post. “Only a fully vaccinated child is protected against this disease or has a very low risk of catching it”, said Fernandes.
The first two rounds of the campaign concentrated on the northern and central provinces. The third round will cover the entire country.
Poliomyelitis is a highly contagious disease, which attacks the nervous system, and can cause permanent paralysis or death. Its main victims are children under the age of 15.
Prior to April, the last case of polio registered in Mozambique was in 1993. In July 2016, Mozambique received, from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the certificate of a country free of polio.
Wild poliovirus was thought to have been eradicated on all continents except Asia. As of 2020, the only countries where the disease was still classified as endemic were Pakistan and Afghanistan.
All of Africa was declared free of polio in 2020, and so the cases in Malawi and Mozambique come as an unpleasant surprise, and as a reminder that, as long as somebody somewhere is carrying the virus, the possibility of transmission still exists.
According to WHO, both the Malawian and the Mozambican cases are linked to a strain of the virus found to be circulating in Pakistan in 2019.