LAHORE: The World Health Organisation (WHO) has extended restrictions on travel from Pakistan for another three months for ‘transferring’ the poliovirus to the African nation of Malawi.

The WHO had imposed travel restrictions on Pakistan in May 2014 due to increasing cases of poliovirus in the country.

“This is the first WPV1 detection in the WHO African Region since 2016, when four cases occurred due to endemic transmission in Nigeria,” the Polio International Health Regulations (2005) emergency committee noted with serious concern.

The committee expressed concern that for the first time since the Public Health Emergency of International Concern had been declared in 2014, there had been a case of polio due to new international spread from the Afghanistan-Pakistan epidemiological bloc, with WPV1 confirmed in a three-year-old child from Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, with onset of paralysis in November 2021.

“The genomic sequencing indicates the closest matching virus to that found in the case is a virus found in 2019 in Pakistan,” it said.

In Pakistan, it said, there was concern about persistent low grade WPV-1 transmission in the central epidemiological corridor (including South KP and South East of Afghanistan) and there was a need to strongly address gaps in surveillance and SIA quality.

The emergency committee also noted that another key challenge was the children still missed in core reservoirs which were being reduced through approaches such as dealing with refusals before the campaign starts and using ‘influencers’, tracking of vaccinators to identify missed children and areas, performing sweeping activities and health camps. As per the polio control room data, more than 22.19 million under five-year-old children had been vaccinated during the campaign.

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2022