Taking no chances
New polio case recorded as Philippines prepares to tackle virus
Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque administering a polio vaccine during an antipolio campaign in Manila. The Philippines has detected its first case of polio since 2001, said officials, putting some of the blame on mistrust stoked by a dengue fever vaccine scandal.
MANILA: The Philippines recorded its second case of polio as it prepared to vaccinate millions of children against a disease it believed to have been eradicated two decades ago.
A five-year-old boy in Laguna, south of the capital Manila, tested positive for the polio virus, the health department said yesterday.
It was the second case this week after a threeyear-old girl was confirmed to be infected on Monday in a province about 1,400km away.
Health officials appealed to parents and caregivers of children to join the government’s polio vaccination programme, which comes as the Philippines grapples to tackle twin outbreaks of dengue and measles that have killed over 1,000 people since January, most of them children.
“The polio vaccinations happen all year round, but our coverage dropped for the past five years,” Rolando Enrique Domingo, an undersecretary of the Department of Health, said.
“We’ve learned our lesson. It is time to move on and really start vaccinating all kids and make sure we sustain this every year.”
The polio virus was detected in the sewage systems of Davao in a nearby province two months ago, as well as in Tondo, a rundown area of Metro Manila notorious for slum communities, Domingo said.
Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan are the last three countries where the disease is endemic. The last known case in the Philippines had been in 1993, according to the World Health Organization.
Immunisation coverage in the Philippines is at 70% – below the recommended rate of 95%, Domingo said, as trust in vaccines declines.
The boy who tested positive in Laguna had been discharged from hospital already, officials said yesterday.
The other case was reported in Lanao del Sur, one of the country’s poorest provinces.
Vaccination teams would aim to administer polio drops to every child younger than five, Domingo said.
There is no cure for polio, which invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours, but it can be prevented with vaccines.
The virus spreads rapidly among children, especially in unsanitary conditions in underdeveloped or war-torn regions where healthcare access is limited.
Children nationwide are at risk as long as a single child remains infected, the United Nations agency for children, Unicef, has said.
The Philippines has faced a challenge recently in convincing parents to vaccinate children after it scrapped a dengue immunisation programme using Sanofi’s Dengvaxia in 2017, following its linkage to child deaths.