The Department of Health has urged all parents to ensure that their babies are innoculated against polio after the first polio case in 13 years was recorded in Botswana.
Health officials have also been placed on polio alert and instructed to be on the look-out for, and to thoroughly investigate, any cases of Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP).

The South African health department said the Botswana case originated in Nigeria. Four Muslim-controlled states in Nigeria recently boycotted polio innoculations after some Muslim clerics warned that they were a Western plot against Muslims and could make women sterile.

Since then, nine other countries in Africa have been re-infected by polio from Nigeria.

A departmental alert to health workers notes that “South Africa in a vulnerable situation due to the high number of immigrants with no record of immunisation against vaccine preventable diseases including polio”.

The department is to launch a mass campaign against polio and measles within weeks, aimed at children who may not have been immunised.
Although South Africa’s overall polio immunisation coverage is 82%, some districts are well below 80%.
The World Health Organisation has urged all countries to ensure that routine immunization coverage reaches 90% and to conduct mopping-up immunization activities in high risk areas.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian state of Kano which boycotted the World Health Organisation (WHO) polio vaccination campaign last August, may soon lift its ban on the vaccine.

Officials in Kano said they had received a “safe” batch of polio vaccines which had been manufactured in the predominantly Muslim country of Indonesia and was therefore deemed to be free of contamination, according to the BBC.
Three other mainly Muslim Nigerian states, Niger, Bauchi and Zamfara, had also initially refused the inoculations. However, they had rejoined the campaign after assurances from President Olusegun Obasanjo and Muslim leaders.
Nigeria now accounts for two-thirds of the world’s polio cases and thousands of Nigerian children have been paralysed by the outbreak, according to figures released by the WHO this week.