Last week was supposed to mark two years since Nigeria had seen a case of wild poliovirus, leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan as the only two countries left in the world where the virus was still circulating. Instead, on Thursday (August 11), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released statements noting that the Nigerian polio surveillance system had documented two children in the northern Borno state who have been paralyzed following poliovirus infection.
“It’s a blow,” Sona Bari, a spokeswoman for the WHO’s polio program, told STAT News. “It’s the first time in history that a country has stopped transmission and then found indigenous virus again.”
Genetic sequencing of the viruses responsible for the two cases revealed that both are related to the last wild poliovirus strain detected in Borno in 2011. This suggests that the virus may have circulated for the ...
