Up to 100,000 health workers and volunteers throughout Ethiopia carried out door-to-door polio immunizations 1-5 April. The campaign is part of efforts this year aimed at immunizing 14.7 million children threatened by an outbreak of the disease in neighboring Sudan.

Dr. Tesfanesh Belay, head of Ethiopia's department of family health, stated at a 30 March press conference in Addis Ababa, the administrative capital, that the countrywide campaigns were a response to the outbreak, which has reintroduced the disease into Ethiopia. Until February, when two cases of polio were confirmed in the state of Tigray near the Sudanese border, Ethiopia had been polio-free for four years.

"To ensure the success of the campaign, 26 national and six international facilitators have been deployed to all regions, where they are currently working with local health authorities in planning, training, and supervising the vaccination teams and monitoring the quality of the campaign," Ethiopia's Daily Monitor newspaper quoted her as saying. "The 21 million doses of oral polio vaccines that have been procured from UNICEF are being dispatched to the regional cold-chain stores."

According to the paper, Belay thanked Ethiopia's friends, including Rotary International, for helping the country protect the substantial investments made over the years to eradicate polio.

On 22 March, Rotary approved a US$500,000 grant to the World Health Organization in support of the April and May National Immunization Days in Ethiopia. At the time, RI President Glenn Estess Sr. noted that a swift response was needed to halt the spread of polio in the country.

"Without timely assistance, there is a very high risk that this virus could spread further, both nationally and internationally," he said. "If we fail to stop the poliovirus now, we will jeopardize the remarkable progress made toward ending polio worldwide."

The poliovirus that infected a boy and girl in Tigray has been linked genetically to northern Nigeria, where a 2003 outbreak of the disease spread to 12 formerly polio-free African countries. Ethiopia is the latest victim of this resurgence, which has seen the same strain of the poliovirus surface in Saudi Arabia.

African countries, with the support of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, have responded with urgency to the outbreak. They have organized several synchronized NIDs targeting tens of millions to ensure that children in transit across porous national borders receive the oral polio vaccine.

In February, 23 countries (including Ethiopia) from central, eastern, and western Africa participated in a "coast to coast" joint polio immunization campaign that targeted 100 million children. Some 20 countries have scheduled synchronized follow-up NIDs for early April and May.