• Surveillance in Nigeria raises polio alarm as NCDC inaugurates website
• New gene-editing technology successfully cures genetic blood disorder

Against the backdrop of insecurity and a humanitarian crisis in northeast Nigeria, new approaches are needed to solve old problems if the polio outbreak is to be stopped.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has highlighted the innovations that are helping to bring the initiative closer to a polio-free world. GPEI urged people to stay tuned to polioeradication.org in the coming months to find out about other innovations driving the GPEI towards the endgame.

Also, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has inaugurated a website, which is at the centre of the digital channels to be deployed by the centre for its communications functions.
[ad unit=2]
Nigerians can now visit www.ncdc.gov.ng, navigate to know more about their NCDC and learn how to protect them now and in the future. The centre’s social channels on Twitter (@NCDCgov) and Facebook.com/NCDCgov are active and are always open for engagement. The centre’s messenger account, m.me/ncdcgov, is also open for especially journalists’ engagement.

Also, a next-generation gene-editing system developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University, United States (U.S.), scientists has successfully cured a genetic blood disorder in living mice using a simple IV treatment. Unlike the popular CRISPR gene-editing technique, the new technology can be administered to living animals and it significantly decreases unwanted, off-target gene mutations.

The findings, reported in Nature Communications, offer a new therapeutic approach to treat genetic diseases of the blood like beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease by targeting faulty genes in hematopoietic stem cells.

The novel system relies on state-of-the-art peptide nucleic acid (PNA) molecules, a synthetic nucleotide technology that has been pioneered at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Nucleic Acids Science and Technology (CNAST).

According to the GPEI, “the polio outbreak response is embedded within a wider humanitarian emergency. Nearly 15 million people have been affected in the northeast states of Ademawa, Gombe, Yobe and Borno, where four children have been reported as paralysed by WPV1 so far this year. Adding to the complexity, 2.2 million people are in areas inaccessible to aid due to insecurity and difficult road conditions caused by the rainy season.”

But new combinations of vaccines to generate the highest possible levels of immunity and approaches to disease surveillance are giving the eradication programme the tools it needs to tailor the response to this particular context.

Stopping polio requires an intimate knowledge of its patterns and behaviours. The polio eradication programme obtains that knowledge through surveillance networks, constantly on the alert for the virus. Despite two years passing with no WPV cases reported, the Nigerian eradication programme was continuing to seek out innovative ways to carry out surveillance in inaccessible areas, such as entering newly accessible areas and camps for internally displaced persons.

In 2016, strains of two types of poliovirus have been found in Nigeria through disease surveillance: WPV1 and circulating vaccine derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2). Both of these strains are genetically linked to viruses found several years previously, indicating that surveillance efforts had not picked up that the viruses were still circulating.