Disease fighters to mark partial victory in polio eradication battle

Published 23/10/2019, 10:21
Disease fighters to mark partial victory in polio eradication battle

By Kate Kelland

LONDON, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Global health officials will on

Thursday announce a partial victory in the decades-long fight to

end polio, with a second of three strains of the crippling virus

certified as eradicated worldwide.

The ending of wild polio virus type 3 - also known as WPV3 -

will be the third human disease-causing pathogen to be

eradicated in history, after smallpox was declared wiped out in

1980 and wild polio virus type 2 (WPV2) in 2015.

Polio spreads in vulnerable populations in areas where there

is no immunity and sanitation is poor. It invades the nervous

system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours.

It cannot be cured, but infection can be prevented by

vaccination - and a dramatic reduction in case numbers worldwide

in recent decades has been largely due to intense national and

regional immunisation campaigns in babies and children.

The last case of polio type 3 was detected in northern

Nigeria in 2012, and global health officials have since been

conducting intense surveillance to ensure it has gone.

"With no wild poliovirus type 3 detected anywhere in the

world since 2012, the Global Commission for the Certification of

Poliomyelitis Eradication is anticipated to officially declare

this strain as globally eradicated," the Global Polio

Eradication Initiative (GPEI) said in a statement.

The success in ending type 3 means that only type 1 of the

wild virus is still circulating and causing infections.

Polio type 1 is endemic in two countries - Afghanistan and

Pakistan - but efforts to wipe it out have faced setbacks in the

past two years.

After reaching a historic low of only 22 cases of wild polio

infection in 2017, the virus has caused 72 cases in Pakistan and

Afghanistan already this year - pushing back yet further the

potential date for the world to wipe polio out altogether.

The first target date for ending polio was set in 1988 by

the GPEI, a partnership of the World Health Organization, the

health charity Rotary International and others, which had aimed

to eradicate it by 2000.

GPEI said, however, that this week's declaration of the end

of WPV3 was a "significant milestone", while Carol Pandak,

director of Rotary's PolioPlus program, said it proves that a

polio-free world is achievable. "Even as the polio program

addresses major challenges, we're making important headway in

other areas," she said.

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