Indonesia finds second polio case, WHO urges action
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Indonesian health officials said on Wednesday they had found a second case of polio as the World Health Organisation (WHO) called on Jakarta to speed up a vaccination drive to prevent an outbreak of the deadly disease.
A top Indonesian health official said the second case was a 20-month-old infant in the same village in the province of West Java as the first child, the first case in Indonesia in a decade.
“This is a follow up investigation from the first case. We found several suspected cases of polio, and this morning we could confirm that there was another one,” Umar Fahmi, director general of communicable diseases eradication at the Health Ministry.
Officials from the ministry and the WHO said on Tuesday they had identified the first case of polio in an 18-month-old infant in a village near the city of Sukabumi, about 100 km (62 miles) south of Jakarta.
The WHO could not confirm the second finding but was still investigating several cases of paralysis in Sukabumi, Georg Petersen, the U.N. health agency’s representative in Indonesia, told Reuters.
Despite a quick response by the government to vaccinate around 4,000 children in the surrounding areas, Petersen called for faster action.
“There is a danger of several places where children could get poliomyelitis so we need to speed up vaccination and improve the vaccination in certain areas,” Petersen said.
“Even if Indonesia has a high (rate of) what we call vaccine coverage, or the majority of children in Indonesia (are) vaccinated against polio, there are always pockets of people with low vaccine coverage.”
He added that the WHO had alerted authorities in neighbouring countries folllowing the discovery of the case.
“This also shows us how every country should have a high vaccine coverage among children because even if Indonesia is relatively well protected, other countries are not and people from there could transmit this,” Petersen said.
Officials have said they fear the disease was brought into Indonesia from Africa via the Middle East and plans were under way to vaccinate more than five million children.
Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago, with more than 17,000 islands. Its last polio case was reported in 1995.
Indonesia is the 16th previously polio-free country to be reinfected in the past two years, including 13 in Africa, according to the United Nations health agency.
The poliovirus mainly strikes children under the age of five and can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours.
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