Volunteers Go House-to-House with Polio Vaccine in Dominican Republic.(Brief Article)

2001 JAN 10 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Volunteers went from house to house in poor neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 18, 2000, vaccinating children against polio in the wake of an outbreak that has left at least six children paralyzed and has alarmed health officials.

"Tomorrow, I need to be able to grab a child on the street, any child under five years old, and ask his mother if he was vaccinated, and she's going to tell me yes," said Jose Beltre, the volunteer coordinator in La Cienega, a squatter neighborhood in the center of the capital.

"We have to get everyone," he told a group of 15 volunteers before they set out, armed with thermoses of the oral vaccine and chalk to mark the houses they had visited.

Health care experts thought polio was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1991, when the last case was reported in Peru. Then in November 2000, an unusual strain of the virus appeared, first in the remote mountain town of Constanza. Six cases have been confirmed in the Dominican Republic and a seventh has been reported in neighboring Haiti. The countries have eight million people each and share the island of Hispaniola.

In response to the outbreak, health officials in the Dominican Republic launched the three-day vaccination campaign starting December 15, 2000. The goal was to vaccinate two million children either at stations or by sending volunteers house to house in poorer and remote areas.

Experts from the Pan American Health Organization say the outbreak was caused not by the wild virus, but by an unusual mutation of the vaccine. The oral vaccine, a relatively safe form of the live virus, is preferred in part because it is ...