KENYA has reported its first case of polio in 22 years, marking a setback in global efforts to eradicate the crippling disease.

A three-year-old girl was found to have the infection at a camp in the remote, arid north-east, which houses refugees fleeing violence in Somalia.

Officials from the Kenyan Government, the World Health Organisation and the UN refugee agency were on their way to Dadaab refugee camp yesterday to try to prevent the infection spreading.

“Investigations have confirmed this to be a case of poliomyelitis,” the Kenyan Health Ministry said in a statement, emphasising that the girl had been isolated and the “situation was under control”.

The Somali mother of the infected girl has told medical officials that her daughter was born in Kenya, had never visited her homeland and had been vaccinated.

This is the latest case to be reported in Africa since a 2003 immunisation boycott by hard-line Islamic clerics in Nigeria, who claimed that the vaccine was part of a US plot to make Muslims sterile or infect them with HIV. The re-emergence of polio in Kenya heightened concerns about the huge flood of Somali refugees entering Kenya owing to fears of war between the powerful Somalian Islamist movement and weak Government.

Health officials have long feared that Somalia and southern Sudan could act as regional incubators of infectious diseases such as polio, undermining work done in countries such as Kenya to prevent its spread. Medical services are non-existent after decades of civil war and tribal strife makes mass immunisation programmes all but impossible.

Polio re-emerged in Somalia in 2005 after an absence of three years, and about 200 cases have been reported since.

The rise of Sharia courts in Somalia has sent a wave of refugees across the border into Kenya this year. So far 34,000 have arrived at refugee camps. Dadaab now houses about 157,000 refugees, stretching resources to the limit.

“The ministry is trying to confirm whether this is an imported case of polio or was acquired in Kenya,” the Health Ministry statement said. “If it was acquired in Kenya it would be the first reported indigenous case since 1984.”

The ministry said that tests in Kenya and South Africa had found the girl to be infected with a polio strain matching one isolated to the Lower Juba region of Somalia. Its capital, Kismayo, was seized by Islamists last month. Since then the number of Somalis crossing into Kenya has risen from 300-400 a day to about 1,000, according to the UN refugee agency. Fadela Chaib, a World Health Organisation spokeswoman, said that the Somali polio strain had originated in Nigeria and it was not uncommon for a vaccinated child to become infected.

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