The French arm of pharmaceutical Rhône-Poulenc SA, is donating 50 million doses of polio vaccine to five African nations plagued by the disease.

Pasteur Mérieux Connaught, the France-based unit of the international company, is donating the vaccines as part of National Immunization Days. The program is sponsored by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF).

The vaccine will be supplied to Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Southern Sudan from 2000 to 2002.

All of the countries are currently at war. Large population shifts throughout the war have complicated vaccine efforts in those countries, WHO reports.

WHO launched a global polio eradication effort in 1998 and estimates the number of paralytic polio cases has dropped by almost 400,000 cases.

National Immunization Days is part of a mass immunization campaign to immunize every child under 5 years of age with two doses of vaccine, regardless of previous immunization status.

Full text of this press release is currently found at:
http://www.who.int/inf-pr-1999/en/pr99-55.html