The World Health Organization (WHO) said yesterday that it had detected a case of the crippling polio virus in Indonesia, indicating that an outbreak rooted in Africa has leapt the Indian Ocean.
The case, affecting a 20-month-old girl on Java, is the first polio infection in Indonesia in nine years, according to Bardan Rana, a medical officer with the UN agency.
Indonesian health officials have launched an immunization drive targeting 5 million children to prevent the spread of the virus which may have been transported from Nigeria via Saudi Arabia.
"There has been a case in Indonesia, the lab has confirmed it. The sequencing has shown that the case was imported and matches strains of the virus found in Saudi Arabia," Rana said.
The virus is believed to have been carried to Saudi Arabia by Muslim pilgrims heading to Mecca. It may have been passed on to Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-populated country, in the same way or through migrant workers.
"There are a lot of ports of entry and a lot of people working in the Middle East. It's not definite, but this is the most likely route," Rana said.
Polio remains endemic in only six countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria and Pakistan, with vaccination programs driving down the number of cases from 350,000 in 1988 to 1,243 last year.
But a handful of African and Middle Eastern nations have reported being reinfected following a boycott last year on polio vaccines in Nigeria, prompted by radical clerics claiming it had been contaminated by US agents.
Nigeria restarted vaccinations last July after an 11-month hiatus, but the disease has resurfaced in Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Botswana, Burkino Faso, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, Togo and Yemen.
Rana said the Indonesian government has begun a major vaccination campaign in the densely populated region of Sukabumi in West Java province where the case was detected on April 21 and confirmed six days later.
"All children under the age of five are being immunized by teams going house-to-house in four surrounding villages. Surveillance has been intensified and spread to a much wider area," he said.
Health ministry secretary-general Umar Fahmi said two other suspected cases had been found in Sukabumi and tests were being carried out.
"We are still waiting for the lab test results," he said.
He said more than 4,000 children had been immunized and 115 children who had contact with the infected child had been identified.
"We are still trying to ascertain, but I have received a report that 13 of them were positive but did not show symptoms because they have immunity," he said.
Rana said that although there was resistance to immunization in many Muslim countries because of fears that the vaccine could lead to impotency, there were few refusals in Indonesia.
Polio is a waterborne virus that usually affects infants and young children, causing paralysis, withered muscles and sometimes death. There is no cure.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the