Yemen is the latest country to experience an outbreak of polio, with 63 cases confirmed by Wednesday 11 May 2005. The outbreak in Yemen, a country that had been categorised as polio free since 1996, and that in Indonesia, a country free of polio since 1995, is yet another setback in the efforts to eliminate global transmission of polio by the end of this year.
The current resurgence in polio can be traced back to 2003 when the northern states of Nigeria stopped polio immunisation amid concerns by Muslim clerics that polio vaccine was part of a broader western campaign of sterilising and spreading HIV within the African community. Since then, the Nigerian strain of polio has been implicated in polio outbreaks in several countries including Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen and Indonesia.
