The World Health Organization stated that officials discovered the disease virus in a young child in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa, according to the Associated Press.
This is the first time that the virus has been detected on the African continent in five years.
Although polio has spread to many African countries in recent years, that outbreak has been linked to viruses already in vaccines, not the wild virus.
In very rare cases, the live virus in the oral polio vaccine can mutate into a version capable of causing epidemics.
The World Health Organization said that laboratory tests showed that the polio virus, which was discovered in Malawi, is linked to the strain that circulates in Pakistan’s Sindh province, where the disease is still endemic.
“As long as wild polio exists anywhere in the world, all countries remain at risk from the virus,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s director for Africa.
Spread mostly from person to person or through contaminated water, polio attacks the nervous system and can sometimes paralyze within hours. The disease mostly affects children under the age of five and has been largely eliminated in rich countries.
Health officials say polio is endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although several countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia have also recorded cases in recent years.
The World Health Organization and its partners have fought for decades to eradicate polio, their initial deadline being to eliminate the disease by 2000, but have since missed many target dates for eradication.
And many control efforts were suspended during the Corona pandemic, which allowed the disease to spread further, prompting some officials to warn that this could represent a devastating setback to plans to eradicate the disease.