A Nigerian military offensive against Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram has opened up a corridor for mobile units of health workers to vaccinate children against polio in parts of the northeast.
But the worsening insurgency poses a grave risk to the campaign to stamp out the crippling virus in Africa’s most populous nation. Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the three countries in the world in which polio is still endemic.
Aid workers say a change of approach in Nigeria, using ‘hit and run’ mobile units that can race into dangerous places when security improves and then get out quickly, has enabled vaccination in zones that previously were off limits.
“We have not gotten this close to getting rid of polio (in Nigeria) before,” Abdulrahman Tunji Funsho, chair of the Nigeria PolioPlus Committee of Rotary International, one of the main organizations behind the campaign, told Reuters.
Boko Haram, which is fighting to set up an Islamic state in religiously-mixed Nigeria, has killed health workers doing polio vaccinations during its five-year-old insurgency, although Funsho said that had not happened since January last year.
The full article continues at http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/07/15/us-nigeria-violence-polio-idINKBN0FK1NS20140715 on Reuters’ website.