Poliomyelitis eradication
WHO African Region certified free of indigenous wild poliovirus
View full image ↗ How was this image made?
The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The celebration carried an uncomfortable same-day fact: sixteen countries in the newly certified region were then having vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks.
Certified by a commission, not proclaimed
On 25 August 2020 the independent Africa Regional Certification Commission officially certified the WHO African Region as free of wild poliovirus.
The 16-member commission decided after reviewing surveillance, immunization and laboratory documentation from all 47 member states and conducting verification visits in every one. Chair Rose Gana Fomban Leke announced that the region had met the criteria.
The last associated paralysis had begun on 21 August 2016 in Borno State, Nigeria — four years and four days earlier.
What "free" covers, and what it does not
The certification concerned indigenous wild poliovirus. Sixteen countries in the region were at that moment experiencing outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2.
Certification means transmission was interrupted under defined surveillance criteria. It does not mean imported wild virus can never reappear, and vaccination and surveillance continued immediately.
The administrative subject was the 47-state WHO African Region rather than every geographically African country.
The scale behind the decision
The region became the fifth of WHO's six regions certified free of wild poliovirus, together representing more than 90% of the world's population.
WHO put the annual paralysis burden in Africa in 1996 at about 75,000 children, and estimated that eradication work since then had spared up to 1.8 million children lifelong paralysis and saved approximately 180,000 lives.
Regional director Matshidiso Moeti celebrated the certification while warning that vaccination had to continue because of vaccine-derived poliovirus.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- The precise administrative subject was the WHO African Region, comprising 47 member states, not a newly constituted certification of every geographically African country on August 25.
- Certification means interruption of indigenous wild-poliovirus transmission under defined surveillance criteria. It does not mean that imported wild virus can never reappear or that all polioviruses have been eradicated.