KUCHING: Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Minister Datuk Seri Fatimah Abdullah yesterday urged all parents to take precautions to protect their children from polio.
Getting immunisation and preventative injections at the public health facilities, she stressed, was necessary for children, especially the newborn infants in order to avoid threats from the polio virus.
“Parents must take this very seriously because the polio virus can cause disabilities among children,” she told the media yesterday after the launch ‘Dapur W.I Sihat, Ceria Selamat’ programme here.
Fatimah was commenting on the resurgence of the highly infectious viral disease which affected a three-month-old boy from Tuaran, Sabah.
The incident was announced as the first polio case in the country, 27 years after its eradication, according to Malaysia Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah who confirmed the infant was infected with vaccine-derived poliovirus type 1 (VDPV1) last Friday.
A lab test report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows that the virus has a genetic affiliation with the polio virus that was traced in the Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) infection case in the Philippines.
