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Jakarta confirms second polio case

Indonesia on yesterday confirmed a second case of polio, but health authorities who were confronting the disease for the first time in a decade said they were confident of preventing a major outbreak.

The new case occurred in the same village in West Java province as the case of 18-month old boy whose infection was announced Tuesday, Dr. Umar Achmadi, head of communicable disease control for the Health Ministry, told reporters.

"We did further investigation and we found six other cases of paralysis, we confirmed one more additional case, and five turned out negative," he said. "I got the test results this morning."

Achmadi said he was "99.9 percent" sure that the second case -- a 20-month old girl -- came from the same source as the first, but that further tests were needed to confirm that.

The cases in the poor farming villager of Girijaya, about 120km southeast of Jakarta, are the first in Indonesia in 10 years.

Yayat, the mother of the sick boy, said she took him to the doctor a couple of weeks ago suffering from a fever.

"The doctor said we should get more tests," said Yayat as her son Fikri lay on her lap, his legs paralyzed. "I don't know what do. We are so poor."

Polio is a waterborne disease that usually infects young children, attacking the nervous system and causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and sometimes death. There is no cure.

Authorities say the strain is genetically similar to one in Nigeria, where the disease spread rapidly after Muslims boycotted the vaccine in 2003 amid rumors of a US-led plot to render them infertile or infect them with AIDS.

From Africa, it spread to parts of the Middle East. An Indonesian migrant worker may have contracted the disease there before returning home, experts say.

Achamdi said health authorities had conducted house-to-house vaccinations in the area, intensified surveillance and drawn up plans to vaccinate 5.2 million children under age 5 by July -- the standard strategy for heading off outbreaks.

Achmadi said he was "very confident there will be no problem" in preventing a major outbreak of the disease. World Health Organization (WHO) officials have said the government was doing everything necessary to contain the disease.

Polio vaccination rates in Indonesia overall are about 90 percent. However, Western Java, where the case occurred, is one of the low pockets, where only 55 percent of the children are protected by the vaccine, according to WHO figures.

Indonesia is the 16th country re-infected with polio since 2003, when Muslims in northern Nigeria began refusing to immunize their children at the urging of hard-line Islamic clerics.

Almost all the cases have been traced to Nigeria, where the boycott continued for nearly a year before local officials stepped in.
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