Polio in Indonesia continues to climb despite efforts by the archipelago nation and the WTO to immunize millions of children on the island. This brings the number of cases reported in Indonesia to 111 after declaring Indonesia polio free since 1995.
The WTO and Indonesia staged a massive “mop-up” effort on May 31st through June 2nd. Sumatra and Central Java will be including in the next phase. The new cases were in Sumatra and Central Java, which means the virus has moved off the main island. They also conducted an outbreak response hitting 78,000 children under 5 when the Central Java case was found.
Another major problem authorities run into is a distrust of the immunization. While the WTO led effort maintains the vaccination will not cause death, many villagers believe otherwise as some children have died within a few months of receiving the virus.
“Investigations revealed that the babies died either from dengue or respiratory diseases,” Yusharman, head of the immunization division at the Health Ministry said in a Forbes story.
According to the World Health Organization, dengue, which causes fevers, rashes, headaches, muscle pain and sometimes death, is an annual occurrence in Indonesia.
The virus was first identified in the Giri Jaya village in the Sukabumi District of West Java. Studies conducted on the origin of this outbreak tied the virus to west African strain and went to Indonesia via the Sudan.
Officials suspect contamination spread by an Indonesian pilgrim visiting Mecca in Saudi Arabia, who picked probably picked it up from a Nigerian pilgrim. At least 3 of the cases match the viral strain from Nigeria. Nigeria is significant because certain radical Muslim clerics suggested the U.S. had contaminated the vaccines to make Muslims infertile back in 2003. In the process, polio spread to a number of other countries and now to Indonesia.
Numbers are still down significantly since 1988, which totaled over 350,000 cases and millions world wide less than a century ago. The disease killed over one million people a year at one point and children are the most susceptible.
A number of countries have experiences resurgence in the disease since the incident in Nigeria two years ago. The disease remains endemic to Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan but Indonesia has people worried because it’s the largest populated Muslim country in the world.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
