UN to declare Egypt polio-free, aiding eradication

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday it is about to announce that Egypt is polio-free, for the first time in 5,000 years, bringing global eradication a step closer.

The last sample of the crippling virus in Egypt was found in sewage in mid-January 2005, but the U.N. agency said it is waiting for the final data for this month before making an expected announcement on Wednesday.

A full year must pass without any new detection of the virus in a country before the WHO can declare it free of the disease, which can cause irreversible paralysis in a child within hours.

"We hope we will be able to announce tomorrow (Wednesday) that Egypt has now been polio-free for a year. That would mean polio is no longer considered to be endemic in Egypt," WHO spokesman Iain Simpson told journalists.

Egypt -- where scars on mummified bodies testify to polio's presence 5,000 years ago -- has not reported any new cases in the past year.

Removing it from the list would be an important boost to the WHO's 18-year campaign to halt the spread of the disease, and then eradicate it, as was achieved with smallpox nearly three decades ago.

The WHO conceded last October that it would miss its target of halting the spread of polio worldwide in 2005, saying it would take another year to complete the job in northern Nigeria.

Without Egypt, the virus would be endemic in just five countries -- Nigeria, Niger, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Niger, all cases reported last year were imported from northern Nigeria, the WHO says.

There have been 1,856 new cases of polio worldwide since Jan. 1, 2005, with Nigeria accounting for nearly half or 749, according to the WHO's tally through Jan. 24, 2006.

This compares with 350,000 a year when the $4 billion campaign was launched in 1988 at a time when 125 countries were considered endemic.

However, in the past two years, polio has spread from Nigeria to 18 countries, mainly in West and Central Africa, and jumped as far as Yemen after the northern Nigeria state of Kano banned immunisations for a 10-month period in 2003-2004.

Religious elders in Kano told people that polio vaccine could cause sterility and AIDS.

Immunisations have since resumed, and the WHO is racing to fill gaps in coverage among Nigerian children and break chains of transmission.

Three regions -- the Americas, the Western Pacific and Europe - are already polio-free. Regional certification requires all countries to prove there has been no transmission for three consecutive years amid good disease surveillance.

"We are at the threshold of a polio-free world," WHO director-general Lee Jong-Wook told the agency's executive board in a speech last week.