The East African nation of Malawi on Monday will launch a mass vaccination campaign against polio, organizers say, the first of four planned rounds of vaccination in the region meant to prevent the spread of the crippling virus.
The effort is a response to the discovery in February that a 4-year-old girl who lives on the outskirts of the country’s capital, Lilongwe, was stricken by type 1 polio — Malawi’s first polio case in three decades and the continent’s first since being declared free of wild polio in 2020. It was also evidence that wild polioviruses had made their way to Malawi from Pakistan, one of only two countries on the planet where wild polio still circulates.