India marks one year since last polio case – Aljazeera.com
Health officials are hailing a polio breakthrough in India, once recognised as the global epicentre of the crippling disease, as the country marked one year since the last recorded case.
India, once home to half of all global cases of polio, on Friday completed one year since an 18-month-old girl in West Bengal was diagnosed with the disease.
The breakthrough could see India removed from a list of nations where polio is still endemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the next month.
With Niger and Egypt taken off that list in recent years, India's removal would see the list of nations with indigenous polio reduced to just three: Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan.
| Polio Eradication |
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In 1988 over 350,000 people were paralysed by Polio annually. Now, cases have reduced over 99 per cent.
Information compiled by the World Health Organisation. |
There are three strains of wild polio virus; in 1999 Type 2 was eradicated."What India has achieved is reaching a first milestone in a very important process," Lieven Desomer, head of the polio unit at United Nations children's agency UNICEF in India, told the AFP news agency.
In a statement, Ghulam Nabi Azad, India's health minister, said: "We are excited and hopeful, at the same time, vigilant and alert".
Part of that alertness is a vast effort of 2.3 million vaccinators across the country to deliver 900 million doses of vaccine in the year since the West Bengal case.
In the Uttar Pradesh district of Moradab, once home to the highest number of polio cases in the nation, door-to-door vaccination teams have treated up to one million children per month.
According to WHO estimates, the Indian government dedicated two billion dollars to polio eradictation over the last decade and a half.
India's falling number of polio cases is part of a global decline through the efforts of national governments, UN agencies and private donors that WHO says has decreased global cases by 99 per cent since 1988.
The advance in a nation where polio had been thought endemic, has raised hopes that polio will join smallpox as the second disease to have been successfully eradicated globally.
"India's success (with polio) is arguably its greatest public health achievement," said Margaret Chan, the WHO's director-general.
India will only be deemed to have eradicated the disease if it stays polio-free for another two years.
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