Africa needs more investment in research and manpower to boost vaccination rates that are less than half the global average, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday.

“There is a health and manpower crisis in Africa ... a human resources crisis. This is a major obstacle to raising immunization coverage,” WHO’s Jong-Wook Lee told a biotech conference in Lyon.

Africa’s vaccination coverage stood at around 30 percent, compared with a world coverage of more than 70 percent, he said.

“The vaccines being used are also old. New investment is needed in research and development, but this is not really being done to a significant extent,” he said.

Jong-Wook Lee said six countries in the world were still considered polio-endemic despite the fact that medicines to deal with the disease had existed since 1954. Three of these countries were in Africa - Egypt, Niger and Nigeria.

Last year, new polio outbreaks were reported in two African countries where it had been eliminated, Guinea and Mali.

“But money is not the only problem. If all the money was available to raise the level of immunization, the system is not there,” he said. “Political commitment is very important.”