World Polio Day: Toward Total Eradication
Oct 24, 2013, 11:00 AM
In honor of World Polio Day, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will highlight polio eradication work around the globe on Twitter and Facebook. Development of the polio vaccine has reduced the disease worldwide by 99 percent, with only Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan as the remaining polio endemic countries in 2012.
But both in endemic countries and in countries where polio was thought to have been vanquished, cases persist. According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, just this week eleven new wild poliovirus (WPV) cases were reported, including one from Afghanistan, two from Ethiopia, four from Pakistan and four from Somalia. The total number of WPV cases for 2013 is now 296, with 99 from countries that have not yet been able to eradicate the disease and 197 from countries that have seen outbreaks. In Israel, for example, while no cases of paralytic polio have been reported, environmental surveillance suggests that virus transmission (first detected in February 2013) continues in parts of the country’s southern and central regions. A vaccination campaign for children under age ten is ongoing.
On December 2, 2011, CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden, MD, MPH, activated CDC’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to strengthen the agency’s partnership engagement through the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). Activation of the EOC has provided enhanced capacity for CDC’s polio eradication support program, which trains public health volunteers in the United States and globally to improve polio surveillance and help plan, implement and evaluate vaccination campaigns.
Additional EOC activities include:
- Publication of several joint World Health Organization Weekly Epidemiologic Record/CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) highlighting polio eradication progress.
- Collaboration with GPEI partners on detailed country-plans for expanded technical and management support, including assistance with outbreak responses, surveillance reviews, vaccination campaign planning and monitoring, and data management.
- Provision of operational support to Nigeria for the country’s FY 2012 Polio Eradication Emergency Response Plan. The plan focuses on enhancing management and leadership skills to improve program performance.
- The development of indicators for monitoring polio vaccination campaign performance in the areas of planning, implementation and evaluation.
- Review of WHO-proposed outbreak response protocols for all polio-affected countries.
“If we fail to get over the finish line [to fully eradicate polio],” says Frieden, “we will need to continue expensive control measures for the indefinite future…More importantly, without eradication, a resurgence of polio could paralyze more than 200,000 children worldwide every year within a decade.”
This commentary originally appeared on the RWJF New Public Health blog.