GENEVA, March 25: A vaccination campaign has rid Somalia of polio, encouraging hopes that the virus can be halted in other insecure regions, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

No Somali child has been paralysed by polio in the past year as a result of a huge campaign to repeatedly vaccinate 1.8 million children in the Horn of Africa nation.

Somalia, where more than 10 per cent of the population lives as refugees after 17 years of conflict, had wiped out the crippling disease in 2002 but it re-emerged three years later from a strain that originated in Nigeria.

Nigeria is one of four countries that have never stopped transmission of the virus. Polio, also endemic in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, spreads through contaminated food and water and mainly affects young children.

Some 10,000 volunteers and health workers delivered multiple doses of oral vaccine to children in Somalia’s hard-to-reach villages, nomadic communities and makeshift camps that have grown as a result of clashes between Muslim insurgents, warlords and Ethiopian-backed Somali government forces.

Bruce Aylward, director of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, said the campaign showed that the virus could be stopped in highly insecure pockets of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and densely populated corners of India where sanitation facilities are lacking.

“Somalia wasn’t lucky the first time,” Aylward said in an interview. “What this demonstrates is that this can be done in areas where there are a lot of things outside of your control.”

There were 1,308 people crippled by polio worldwide last year, compared to about 350,000 yearly when the eradication drive started in 1988.

Without continued aggressive vaccinations, Aylward said the remaining reservoirs of polio could easily grow and spread, driving the global toll back up to around 200,000 cases a year.

“We need a permanent solution to this,” he said.

The Canadian epidemiologist voiced particular concern about northern Nigeria, where he said too few children were being immunised despite an easing of local concerns about the safety of the vaccine.

Some 20 countries were re-infected with polio originating in Nigeria after regional leaders temporarily halted vaccinations in mid-2003, reducing immunity levels among children there.

Strains from India have also spread to other countries. At present, Niger, Nepal, Angola, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Sudan and Myanmar are all working to stamp out a virus that they had previously stopped.

Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Bio Farma all manufacture polio vaccine used in the eradication campaign, which is run jointly by the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, Rotary International and the US-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.—Reuters