CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's Health Ministry will carry out a vaccination campaign for children in several Cairo areas after polio was recently found in the capital's sewage.
The World Health Organization says a wild poliovirus was discovered in samples taken from sewage in the impoverished Cairo districts of Ezbet el-Haggana and Dar el-Salam and is believed to have been transmitted from Pakistan.
The Egyptian Health Ministry's head of preventive medicine says the ministry will start vaccinating children under 5 in those neighborhoods on Feb. 3. The campaign will be broadened around Cairo in the first week of March, Amr Qandil said Thursday.
Egypt was declared polio free after its last case in May 2004, and Qandil said no new cases have been reported.
