In mid-February 2022, Dr Modjirom Ndoutabe, then the Polio Rapid Response Team Coordinator at the WHO Regional Office for Africa, was on mission in Senegal when he received an email that made his head spin. “I can say it seemed like the sky was falling in on our heads,” Dr Ndoutabe says.
Bad news in Dr Ndoutabe’s line of work is frequently heart-breaking: when polio manages to break through a community’s immunity ramparts, the breach is typically signalled by the paralysis of a child. While the February email did concern a paralysed child – a three-year-old girl living with her grandparents in a township in Lilongwe, Malawi, who had first fallen sick in November – it constituted bad news on another scale altogether.
Read more at: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/wild-polio-returns-africa-how-gpei-helped-stop-outbreak-becoming-inferno
