26 July 2024, Cairo, Egypt - Health ministers from across the Eastern Mediterranean Region have united to address the polio emergency in the occupied Palestinian territory. The urgent need for coordinated, collective regional action to combat circulating variant poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) in the Gaza Strip was the focus of the 11th meeting of the...

A child receives routine immunizations in Mogadishu, Somalia, August 2023. Photo credit: WHO/I. Taxta14 February 2024  – A new investment case shows that successful polio transition in the 8 priority countries of the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region will have a very high return on investment. Economic and social benefits totalling an estimated...

Dr Abdellatif Abdelwahab, Public Health Officer of White Nile State (left), collecting stool samples from Sennar State on his way to Gezira State. WHO/Sudan23 July 2023 – At the earliest signs of the ongoing conflict in Sudan, in the middle of April, WHO’s country team sprang into action. After all, conflict and infectious diseases are known to be...

Like any other infectious or communicable diseases, polioviruses do not recognize international borders. They do, however, recognize and spread effortlessly among young children with low immunity. To prevent any spread of polioviruses in their region, from 21-22 December 2022, Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health hosted neighbouring Chad and South Sudan...

KHARTOUM, 28 December 2022 – Tomorrow the Federal Ministry of Health in Sudan, in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) will launch a catch-up vaccination campaign to vaccinate children against polio and yellow fever from 29 December 2022 to 3 January 2023. This campaign will cover...

KHARTOUM, 22 December 2022 – On 16 December 2022, a case of a variant type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2) was confirmed in a young boy aged four years in West Darfur, Sudan. The virus detected is most closely related to a strain circulating in Borno, Nigeria, in 2021, and is unrelated to the poliovirus variant that affected Sudan in 2020 and which was...

Qatar, supported by WHO, ramps up surveillance for polio during the FIFA World Cup 2022 Around the time when the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup tournament was introduced, in 1930, children didn’t have access to polio vaccines. Additionally, systems to search for polio symptoms in children were most likely weak...

Polio Director for the Eastern Mediterranean Region calls for people at all levels to act to end polio   Credit: WHOAmman, 24 October 2022 –On World Polio Day, marked on 24 October across the world, countries around the world are stepping up efforts to end polio. This year’s theme for the day has been ‘Together We End Polio’ and emphasis has been...

Djibouti, 12 October 2022 – The national polio vaccination campaign, initiated by the Government of Djibouti and carried out by the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with WHO and UNICEF, started on Monday 10 October 2022. It will run for five days, until Friday 14 October 2022. More than 150 000 children under the age of 5 in Djibouti will...

25 September 2022 – It takes more than a town crier reading off a scroll to close a polio outbreak in any country. Rather, it takes multi-disciplinary teams of experts wading through country-level data from polio eradication programmes – often more than once. They scrutinize evidence, crunch numbers to analyse information, and interview health...