Four years after the appearance of the last cases in northeast Nigeria, the good news will finally fall: the World Health Organization (WHO) certifies this Tuesday the African continent "free from wild poliovirus".
"Thanks to the efforts of governments, healthcare workers and communities, more than 1.8 million children have been saved" from this disease, said the WHO in a statement released before this historic meeting. .
The official announcement, by videoconference, is to bring together the director general of the WHO, the Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, its regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, the Nigerian billionaires and philanthropists Aliko Dangote and American Bill Gates.
“It's a great victory, a deliverance,” says Dr Tunji Funsho, from the Polio Nigeria committee of the Rotary International association. “It's been more than 30 years since we launched this challenge. To say I'm happy is an understatement! », Rejoices this Nigerian doctor who has dedicated his life to this cause.
Huge work to convince the populations
Nigeria, an African giant of 200 million inhabitants, was the epicenter of the disease in the world at the beginning of the 2000s. In the Muslim north, under pressure from Salafist circles, the polio vaccination campaigns had stopped between 2003 and 2004, accused by rumors of being the tool of a vast international plot to sterilize Muslims.
It took a lot of work with traditional and religious leaders to convince people to have their children vaccinated. “People trust their leaders more than their politicians because we live with them,” explains Grema Mundube, community leader in Monguno, a town in the far northeast of the country. "We talked to them and vaccinated our own children, and over time they too accepted the vaccine."
In areas totally controlled by jihadists, WHO and its partners have approached populations on the roads or markets to create a network of “health informants” and “sentries” that can alert cases or potential epidemics. “We had to build a pact of trust with these populations, by providing them with free medical care, for example,” Dr Audu reports.
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Today, it is estimated that only 30,000 children are still "inaccessible": a figure "too low" to ensure epidemic transmission, according to scientific experts.
Afghanistan and Pakistan still affected
Caused by 'wild poliovirus', polio is an acute infectious disease that mainly affects children, attacks the spinal cord and can cause irreversible paralysis.
It was endemic all over the world, until the discovery of a vaccine in the 1950s. The richest countries quickly had access to it, but Asia and Africa remained for a long time important centers of infection. In 1988, the WHO counted 350,000 cases worldwide and still more than 70,000 cases in Africa alone in 1996.
Thanks to a rare collective awareness and significant financial efforts ($ 19 billion over 30 years), only two countries in the world today have polio infections: Afghanistan (29 cases in 2020) and Pakistan (58 cases).
Africa must now ensure that no case from these countries will undermine this success and that a sufficient proportion of its children are vaccinated to ensure the continent's full immunization.
In addition, coincidentally, the Congolese Minister of Health declared on Tuesday in Kinshasa the end of a deadly measles epidemic which killed, in 25 months, more than 7,000 children under five in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. .