News item in Science. Extracts below. Read online:
https://www.science.org/content/article/house-house-polio-vaccination-re...
The new Taliban government of Afghanistan has given the green light for house-to-house polio vaccination to resume across the entire country on 8 November.
The 18 October announcement is “huge,” says Hamid Jafari, who directs operations in the region for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). It will give the program access to 3.3 million Afghan children who have been out of reach for 3.5 years—and might bring the world closer to the ultimate goal of global polio eradication.
A decades long campaign against the disease has left Afghanistan as one of just two countries, along with neighboring Pakistan, to still harbor the wild polio virus. But the fight has been hamstrung there since 2018, when the Taliban, suspicious that vaccinators were helping the U.S. government target drone strikes, banned house-to-house vaccination in its stronghold in southern Afghanistan. Since then, roughly 85% of the country’s polio cases have occurred in areas that are off limits to the vaccinators...
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Neil Pakenham-Walsh, HIFA Coordinator, neil@hifa.org www.hifa.org
