Thursday, January 19, 2012

Public Health: Polio

The World Health Organization reported last week that "India appears to have interrupted wild poliovirus transmission, completing one year without polio since its last case, in a 2-year-old girl in the state of West Bengal, on 13 January 2011. India was once recognized as the world’s epicentre of polio." If confirmed, "the number of polio-endemic countries, those which have never stopped indigenous wild poliovirus transmission, will then be reduced to a historical low of three: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan."http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/polio_20120113/en/index.html