- The World Health Organisation faulted Kenya for not declaring a national outbreak immediately as required by the International Health Regulations.
- The WHO noted they were all circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses type 2, which is common in under-vaccinated communities in Somalia.
Image: FILE
Kenya has been reprimanded for keeping secret a polio outbreak in December 2020 and January this year.
Six cases of mutated polio virus were detected in Kenya during that time.
Three cases were newly-arrived children from Somalia at the Dadaab refugee camp. Their stool was tested and found to have the mutated poliovirus.
A mutated virus was also found in a separate sewage sample from Garissa, while two samples of sewage collected in Mombasa were found to have a similar virus.
The World Health Organisation faulted Kenya for not declaring a national outbreak immediately as required by the International Health Regulations.
The WHO noted that the last of these cases was confirmed on January 25.
“The committee noted that Kenya and Tajikistan had not declared the new outbreaks as national emergency and requested the Global Polio Eradication Initiative to have discussions with these countries about the importance of making such a declaration, notwithstanding the reported vigorous country responses,” the WHO's IHR Committee for Polio says in a statement.
However, a Ministry of Health official told the Star the immediate reporting is for wild polio virus, which has already been eradicated in Africa.
“We are in the process of reporting the current cases officially, but it’s a lengthy process. The samples also had to go through confirmatory tests,” he said.
All the cases are importations from Somalia, where vaccination rates are extremely low.
The WHO noted they were all circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses type 2, which is common in under-vaccinated communities in Somalia.
The solution is widespread vaccination to break any possible transmission.
“If even one child tests positive for polio, 200,000 other children are considered by the WHO to be at risk of contracting the virus,” Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said.
Last week, Kagwe launched a polio vaccination drive targeting more than 3.4 million children in 13 counties.
The campaign will end on Wednesday. It aims to vaccinate 249,391 children in Garissa, 323,620 in Mombasa, 255,885 in Mandera, 51,206 in Isiolo, 180,714 in Wajir, 175,425 in Kitui, 85,020 in Tana River, 25,104 in Lamu, 233,770 in Machakos, 330,465 in Kiambu, 327,338 in Kilifi, 234,197 in Kajiado, and 965,243 in Nairobi.
The second round of the vaccination will start from June 19 to 23.
Head of surveillance and epidemic response at the ministry Dr Emmanuel Okunga, said the recent cases were detected because of Kenya’s efficient surveillance system.
“We test children coming into Kenya, they are healthy children but we take their stool samples and test for polioviruses so in this case we detected poliovirus in three children who came from Somalia and they had come to Garissa,” he said at the launch last week.
“We also have surveillance system where we picked sewage samples and because of that, we were able to detect three poliovirus in Mombasa and also Garissa. So these are the reasons for which we have to conduct a response.”
The last case of mutated polio virus was from a sewage sample collected in Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate in 2018.
The Ministry of Health followed by vaccinating 800,000 children in the city.
Kenya last reported the wild polio case in 2013 when an outbreak in Somalia led to an importation of 14 cases to the country.
The WHO certified Africa free of the wild polio virus on August 25, 2020.
-Edited by SKanyara