Abuja, 2 December -- President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria has stressed the need for African countries to focus their collective attention on the task of implementing full immunization of children throughout the Region as a step towards achieving the global goal of polio eradication.

"These goals (full immunization and polio eradication) are achievable; and for the sake of the African child, they must be achieved," the Nigerian leader said Monday in the Nigerian capital while opening the 10th meeting of the Task Force on Immunization (TFI) in Africa and the 9th meeting of the African Inter-Agency Coordination Committee.

President Obasanjo said he was convinced the will existed to tackle the problem and called for immediate regional action to ensure full immunization coverage for vaccine-preventable diseases for children under the age of five. "Where there is a will, there is a way. I believe the will is there. Let us join hands to find the way," he said.

In a message to the meeting, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Ebrahim M. Samba, stated that considerable progress had been made in immunizing African children against vaccine-preventable diseases since the TFI was established ten years ago.

According to him, the number of polio-endemic countries in the African Region had declined from 20 in 1996 to three as at December 2002, while a partnership established in 2001 for the accelerated control of yellow fever had resulted in the vaccination of more than 70 million African children. This has saved the lives of 150,000 children, he said.

Dr Samba's message was delivered by the Director of the Division of Communicable Diseases Prevention and Control at the Brazzaville-based WHO Regional Office for Africa, Dr Antoine Kabore.

The WHO Regional Director stated that a lot still remained to be done in spite of the successes so far achieved. Principal among these are meeting the global goal of interrupting polio transmission by 2003, reducing morbidity and mortality due to measles, and ensuring 80 per cent vaccination coverage in all health districts in most of the 46 countries in the WHO African Region.

Dr Samba noted that there was a significant decline in funding in the face of these demands and called on Member States and development partners to double their efforts to ensure that these challenges were met. He also pledged that WHO, in collaboration with development partners, will continue to assist countries in strengthening and improving their routine immunization services.

Concluding, he made a special appeal to the ingenuity of the Nigerian people to ensure that nothing stood in the way of interrupting wild polio virus transmission in the West African country by December 2003".

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