Photo: © The Hindu
Today India is celebrating a milestone in the fight against polio: in the last year, no new cases were reported. This means a lot to those involved in the prevention and immunization programmes. The last case was detected on January 13, 2011 in a 2-year-old girl in India's West Bengal state. This means that India will no longer be considered "polio-endemic". But the fight against polio is not finished yet.
Nata Menabde, head of WHO office in India, said in an interview: "We are all subject to relaxing a bit when we have achieved some goal but we simply cannot allow that to happen with polio". She is right. It's true that one year of no reported cases of polio is an important achievement, but let's not forget it will take another two years of no cases before India can be called "polio-free". "While India may have stopped transmission of wild polio virus, it does not prevent such virus from being re-imported or in fact the virus could be around and it has just not been detected", Menabde added.
In 2009, nearly half of the world's polio cases were reported in India (741 cases). In 2010, this number dropped to 42 and last year only 1 case was reported in India. What has happened in the meantime? A mass eradication programme was launched in the country, costing billions of dollars and mobilizing millions of people to immunize every children under the age of 5 against polio. Around 900,000 doses of oral polio vaccine were given, immunizing 172 million children and involving 2.3 million vaccinators who visited around 2000 million homes in 2011. There were also mobile vaccination teams that immunized children in bus stops, train station and marketplaces.
All these efforts are likely to continue. Let's not forget that in countries like Tajikistan, Angola, Bangladesh or Russia, which were certified as "polio-free" for many years, there were cases of re-infections. The next years will be crucial to India's fight against polio: "If even one case occurs here again, we really have to mobilize a major effort and respond to it as emergency and do the mop up campaigns and vaccinate children around the area where such a thing may happen", Menabde said. "We have to finish the job as while there is one polio case in anywhere in the world, every country is vulnerable".
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