Last week, the federal government and its health collaborators celebrated a rare achievement. Nigeria is on the global radar, but not for the wrong reasons.
The country’s most vulnerable population, children below five years, will not grow up with paralysed limbs because of polio, an eradicable disease which defies cure.
On July 25, 2015, the health authorities marked one full year of no new case of the wild polio virus disease. The last recorded case was in Sumaila Council in Kano on July 24, 2014.
Two more years of sustaining immunisation from now and the global community headed by World Health Organisation (WHO) would declare polio eradicated from Nigeria.
For the one full year without any new case, WHO delisted Nigeria from the endemic countries’ list. That leaves Pakistan and Afghanistan on the list.
But the risk remains high that, if not eradicated from these countries, over the next decade, at least 200,000 infections will again spread around the world.
That Nigeria has successfully interrupted the transmission of polio calls for celebration.
An elated President Muhammadu Buhari told WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, that the Presidential Task Force on Polio Eradication will be reconstituted in the Ministry of Health to provide political direction and oversight in order to avoid complacency and relapse.
Moreover, Nigeria will maintain and improve on its surveillance system as well as raise the childhood population immunity against the polio virus.
Moeti, who brought the good news with the delisting certification from WHO Director General, Margaret Chan, urged Nigeria to ensure that no child gets paralysed in next two years by polio.
“It is very clear that even though polio transmission in Nigeria has been interrupted, we still have a long road to travel towards its eradication. We must ensure that in the next two years, no child is paralysed due to polio,” she said.
But the journey to the goal was arduous. The myths, superstitions and ignorance surrounding the disease were more notoriously inhibitory than the difficulties of finding the scientific cure with an efficacious drug or preventive vaccine.
In February, 2004, a delegation of respected Muslim leaders and Kano State government went with samples of vaccines to Indonesia, India and South Africa for scientific testing and analyses.
The rumour was that the anti-polio vaccines were deliberately adulterated with anti-fertility agents (estradiol hormone) to limit the population of the North and spread HIV and carcinogens.
A thoroughly embarrassed donor agency looked on aghast and the disease continued to cripple children for 11 months while the adults junketed from one country to another looking for trustworthy tests.
Needless to add, no Nigerian laboratory, universities or even teaching hospitals, could be trusted to give an accurate, credible test results. Matters could not be worse.
Polio is no curse. It is a highly infectious viral disease. It invades the central nerve system and may cause paralysis in a matter of hours, WHO explains.
It spreads mainly from person-to-person via the faecal route or less frequently via contaminated food and water and multiplies in the intestines.
The game changer in Nigeria was the appointment of Ado Muhammad as executive director of National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA). At the time in late 2011, there were still as many as 123 cases of the disease in Nigeria.
A year later, the number of cases dropped to 53 and in 2014 to only six. Muhammad’s interventions included health camps, polio survivor groups, volunteer community mobilisers, religious and traditional leaders, community clowns and entertainers, using village theatres. The Nigeria Governors Forum took up the task, councils and councilors joined hands with foreign partners like WHO, UNICEF, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank which had to step in when the government could not meet its funding obligations.
Now, two more years to go.
The medical workers’ commitment to the total eradication must be sustained. So do the financial and vaccine requirements from GAVI and others.
Muhammad projects that $155 million and $249 million will cover the project for the next two years.
Last year, Nigeria conquered Ebola virus disease. So also was guinea worm eradicated. Now, it is the polio virus.
But other child killer diseases abound. Measles, DPT, whooping cough, among others.
Former Head of State, Yakubu Gowon, has joined in the campaign to roll back malaria. Nigerian foundations must take up the funding obligations of foreign partners.
Muhammad and NPCDH face the challenge to eradicate the other childhood killer diseases as well.
And more than any other person, Buhari must work hard to ensure that the remaining child killer diseases are brought under control.
We applaud all the preventive medicine workers and their global and local partners. We urge them to sustain their efforts till no child in the country is paralysed by polio.
It is commendable to convince WHO to delist and certify Nigeria polio-free. But it is more edifying if the disease is eradicated in two years.