After decades of the Polio disease posing as a serious health-care crisis in Africa, the Africa Regional Certification Commission has declared the continent a wild polio-free zone.
The Poliovirus is transmitted from person to person either through droplets from the upper respiratory tract during the early days of infection or, more commonly, through the ingestion of infectious contaminated material in circumstances of poor hygiene.
Reports show that Nigeria was the last country with a reported case of wild polio, leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan the only two countries in the world to still have cases of the virus strain.
The Nigerian government organised more than a dozen supplementary immunisation campaigns with oral polio vaccine, worked on strengthening routine immunisation and improved its polio surveillance networks to reach more children.
The milestone marks a significant victory for managing the communicable disease, with more than 95% of the African population immunised against the potentially deadly virus with paralysis as a defining characteristic.
