By DEANNA BELLANDI
Associated Press

CHICAGO — The number of confirmed polio cases has reached 243 in Yemen, a country that was once believed to have been free of the disease, the chief of the World Health Organization said.

Yemen accounts for nearly half of the 533 cases in the world this year as of June 15, said Dr. Lee Jong-wook, the agency's director-general. A recent outbreak in Indonesia has brought the number of cases there to 51, he said.

"The threat of a polio importation is a real and continuing one," Lee said Tuesday. "The recent importation to Yemen and Indonesia remind us that we must continue to protect the children everywhere until the polio is stopped in the endemic countries."

Lee was in Chicago for the 100th anniversary conference of Rotary International, an Evanston-based humanitarian organization that has given more than $600 million and volunteers to help eradicate polio.

The disease, which spreads through dirty water, usually infects young children. It attacks the nervous system and causes paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and sometimes death.

Yemen and Indonesia previously were polio-free but have reported new cases since 2003 after a vaccine boycott in Nigeria that is blamed for spreading the disease to other countries.

Hardline Islamic clerics in northern Nigeria claimed the polio vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot to render Nigeria's Muslims infertile or infect them with AIDS. Vaccination programs restarted in Nigeria in July 2004 after local officials ended the 11-month boycott.

Nigeria had 169 cases of polio this year as of Tuesday, said Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the WHO's Global Polio Eradication Program.

Other countries that have reported polio this year are: Cameroon 2; Ethiopia 10; Sudan 25; India 18; Pakistan 10; Afghanistan 3 and Niger 2.

Polio in the United States was eradicated in the late 1970s and the World Health Organization launched a drive in 1988 to do it globally through massive immunization efforts. Those efforts have reduced the number of cases from 350,000 a year in 1988 to 1,267 cases last year.

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