Polio return a headache for Papua New Guinea

Decades after polio was eradicated from Papua New Guinea, the crippling and sometimes deadly disease has returned, leaving doctors scrambling to revive long-lapsed vaccination programmes. Until earlier this year, the polio virus was endemic in only three countries in the world: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. But a relatively rare strain is now spreading throughout Papua New Guinea, one of the world’s poorest countries. Since the first case was detected in April — paralysing a six-year-old boy named Gafo near the northern coast — polio has infected dozens more nationwide, prompting the government to declare a national emergency.

Papua New Guinea, which today has a population of around eight million people, thought it had eradicated the wild variant of the virus in 1996, and was certified polio-free in 2000.

But since then, experts say, lapsed vaccination programmes and poor sanitation have left an open invitation for the prehistoric disease to return. “It’s not a sudden surprise,” said Monjur Hossain, a UNICEF expert living in Port Moresby. “The government knew about it,” he said. In a cruel twist, the virus afflicting Papua New Guineans today — clinically known as VDPV1 — started life as a vaccine.

The much-weakened version of the polio virus was first ingested as an oral vaccine, before spreading throughout the community via feces.

Because of low-levels of immunisation, the harmless attenuated virus continued to circulate person-to-person for a long period of time, allowing it to mutate into a more virulent strain.

Similar localised outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio have been previously detected in the Horn of Africa, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Still, healthcare workers are adamant that the benefits of vaccination programmes massively outweigh the risk of vaccine-derived polio.

Doctors in Papua New Guinea are trying to respond to the crisis by providing countrywide immunisation. Hundreds of thousands have already been vaccinated. Despite government and international support, the country’s lack of roads and unforgiving terrain have made that task difficult. Many villages can only be reached by air, or by day-long river trips. Throw into the mix tribal violence, malnutrition, drought, outbreaks of diseases like measles and the aftermath of a February earthquake and things become more difficult still.

“It’s really challenging in terms of access, in terms of logistics,” said Hossain. “It’s very expensive and very tough.”