Update (May 18): Health officials in Mozambique have declared a polio outbreak after confirming a case in the country's northeastern Tete province. Viral sequencing information indicates that the virus circulating in Mozambique is closely related to the poliovirus circulating in Pakistan as recently as 2019.
On Monday (March 21), the East African nation of Malawi will launch the first of four rounds of a large-scale polio vaccination campaign in an effort to stop the devastating virus from spreading further, according to STAT.
In February, a 4-year-old girl who lives outside of the country’s capital, Lilongwe, was diagnosed with type 1 polio and became paralyzed as a result of her infection. The case was the country’s first in three decades and the first on the continent since 2020. According to STAT, the poliovirus likely made its way into Malawi from Pakistan, one of only two countries where polio is still endemic. ...
