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Africa

In 2003, in northern Nigeria – a country that at that time was considered provisionally polio free – a fatwa was issued declaring that the polio vaccine was designed to render children sterile. Subsequently, polio reappeared in Nigeria and spread from there to several other countries. In 2013, nine health workers administering polio vaccine were targeted and killed by gunmen on motorcycles in Kano, but this was the only attack. Local traditional and religious leaders and polio survivors worked to revive the campaign, and Nigeria was removed from the polio-endemic list in September 2015 after more than a year without any cases, only to be restored to the list in 2016 when two cases were detected.

Africa was declared free of wild polio in August 2020, although cases of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 continue to appear in several countries.

A single case of wild polio that was detected in Malawi in February 2022, and another in Mozambique in May 2022 were both of a strain imported from Pakistan and do not affect the African region's wild poliovirus-free certification status.