Dominicans Wage Anti-Polio Campaign

Volunteers went from house to house in poor neighborhoods Saturday, vaccinating children against polio in the wake of an outbreak here that has left at least six children paralyzed and alarmed health officials.

“Tomorrow, I need to be able to grab a child on the street, any child under 5 years old, and ask his mother if he was vaccinated, and she’s going to tell me yes,” said Jose Beltre, the volunteer coordinator in La Cienega, a squatter neighborhood in the center of Santo Domingo, the capital.

“We have to get everyone,” he told a group of 15 volunteers before they set out, armed with containers of the oral vaccine and chalk to mark the houses they had visited.

Health care experts thought that polio had been eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1991, when the last case was reported in Peru. Then, in November, an unusual strain of the virus appeared, first in the Dominican mountain town of Constanza. Six cases have been confirmed in the Dominican Republic; one case has been reported in Haiti.

The countries have 8 million people each and share the island of Hispaniola.