SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Battle to Eradicate Polio Reaches Critical Endgame
from New Scientist
The long campaign to eradicate polio faces a crucial turning point this month. On 16 January, the 34 countries represented on the World Health Organization's executive board will be asked to ditch the vaccine that has cut polio cases by 99 per cent since 1988. The aim: to prevent the vaccine itself defeating the whole effort.
Scientists have been warning since 2000 that the endgame in tackling polio--now endemic only in south Asia and Nigeria--would be tricky. We have been fighting the disease with trivalent oral polio vaccine (tOPV), containing weakened viruses from each of the three polio strains. The idea has been to stop the wild virus circulating worldwide, at which point everyone in the world stops using the vaccine at the same time.
But vaccine viruses persist in the environment and in a few people who are chronically infected. These viruses can regain the ability to cause polio, as an outbreak in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2000 showed. As vaccination is withheld from more and more newborn children, those viruses could return.
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