Health Alerts

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) increased the polio outbreak travel Alert for 14 African countries. Both the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend visitors to infected areas for more than 4 weeks should receive an additional dose of oral polio vaccine (OPV) or inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) within 4 weeks to 12 months of travel. The countries are Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Togo and Zambia. In a breakthrough for the eradication of Polio an independent commission of experts concluded during October 2019, that wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3) has been ‘eradicated’ around the world. This announcement follows the earlier eradication of wild poliovirus type 2 during 2015. Read more