|© UNICEF video| |In a Jakarta health station, a child receives
drops of polio vaccine. A total of 240 cases of polio have been
reported in Indonesia since March.| By Suzanne Yates GIRIJAYA,
Indonesia, 29 September 2005 – In this verdant mountain village,
high in the hills of west Java, two-year-old Fikri must now
learn to walk for the second time in his life. But he now
stumbles with braces strapped to his legs. Fikri was the first
child in Indonesia to contract polio when the current outbreak
began about seven months ago. Medical authorities here were
dismayed last March when Fikri’s case was first reported.
Doctors and public health officials thought the scourge had been
banished from Indonesia forever. The country had been free of
polio for over a decade as a result of a global campaign to
eradicate the disease, which at its peak paralyzed or killed one
thousand children a day. |© UNICEF video| |In a village high in
the hills of west Java, Fikri – the first boy to contract polio
in a new outbreak in Indon