Beginning from Saturday March 6, Nigeria joined 19 countries in West and Central Africa in a campaign to immunize over 85 million children under five years old against polio. The four-day exercise ends today.

Nigeria's effort has been supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organisation (WHO), and other international partners.

A schedule of the programme from the UNICEF office in Nigeria shows that staff at 19,112 fixed immunization posts will immunize babies and children while 32,172 house-to-house vaccination teams and 14,224 special teams carrying vaccine cool are travelling on foot or motorbikes and in cars and boats on the door-to-door vaccination drive.

The other countries involved in this special programme include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal and Sierra Leone. All these countries are in the March 6 to 9 immunization programme.

Cote d' Ivoire, Niger and Togo will join at a later date because of transition programmes currently taking place in the three countries.

The campaign is being spearheaded by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a network of partners including national governments, the Rotary International, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the International Federation of the Red Cross, as well as the UNICEF and WHO.

The aim is to reach every child under the age of five. It is considered significant because without a critical mass of children being immunized, the virus will rage on. More than 400,000 volunteers and health workers are involved in the aim to reach the targeted 85 million children.

Part of a statement from UNICEF which relates the incidence of polio in the two subcontinents, reads, "For children in West and Central Africa, the threat of the crippling disease, eradicated in much of the world, still looms. In Nigeria, the virulent polio virus is still endemic. In 2008, it spread from the north of the country to other nations in the region. Many of these countries were on the way to being declared polio-free and had successfully eradicated the virus. Yet with the movement of people across borders, and the inadequate level of routine immunization in many areas, the virus has quickly spread. Now, many of these areas are re-infected, threatening more children with paralysis and even death."

In the current logistical exercise, vaccination teams are crossing some of the toughest and most challenging terrain in Africa to reach children. The teams, equipped with special carriers that ensure the vaccine remains below the required 8 degrees Celsius, go from door to door in search of every child under five.

Experienced health workers are being deployed to locations known to be the most challenging. A special plan is in place to focus on the border areas between countries with an independent monitoring system developed to track progress.

Count Down, an internet newsletter produced every two weeks by the World Health Organization in Nigeria, provides an update on the effect of polio in Nigeria within the last one year. According to the update which comes under the caption, "Total number of children paralysed by polio 26 February 2009 to 26 February 2010," Kano State presents the worst case of 70.

Kano is followed by other affected states in this order: Katsina (25), Bauchi (23), Borno (16), Kebbi (14), and Niger (13). Zamfara, Sokoto, and Kaduna states had 10 cases each, while Gombe and Yobe had nine and eight cases respectively. The states of Delta, Kogi, and Nasarawa suffered five polio paralysis each within the recorded year while Benue, Plateau and Bayelsa came down each with four. Three and two cases were recorded against Ogun and Ebonyi States respectively while Abia, Lagos, Edo and Kwara states had one each.

The Count Down newsletter, known fully as Count Down to Polio Eradication in Nigeria, also reports, however, that a more portent vaccine, the bivalent Oral Polio Vaccine (bOPV)), which was administered for the first time in Africa in Nigeria during the January National Immunization Plus Days (IPDs) would speed up the interruption of the polio viruses troubling Nigeria and neighbouring countries.

It explains in its report that the bOPV "simultaneously targets type 1 and 3 polio viruses and is at least 30 percent more effective than the traditional trivalent polio vaccine, according to a clinical field trial conducted in India."

The success of the polio eradication exercise will be significant. It will mean the prevention of a life of disability and physical hardship in communities already facing countless threats to survival.