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A child receives oral polio vaccine during a 2002 campaign to immunize children in India. Poliovirus. Polio eradication, the goal of permanent global cessation of circulation of the poliovirus and hence elimination of the poliomyelitis (polio) it causes, is the aim of a multinational public health effort begun in 1988, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's ...
Its goal was to eradicate polio by the year 2000. The updated strategic plan for 2004–2008 expects to achieve global eradication by interrupting poliovirus transmission, using the strategies of routine immunization , supplementary immunization campaigns, and surveillance of possible outbreaks.
The history of polio (poliomyelitis) infections began during prehistory. Although major polio epidemics were unknown before the 20th century, [1] the disease has caused paralysis and death for much of human history. Over millennia, polio survived quietly as an endemic pathogen until the 1900s when major epidemics began to occur in Europe. [1]
WHO passed a resolution to eradicate polio in 1988, spurred on by the success of eliminating smallpox eight years earlier. Their original target was to wipe out polio by 2000.
The following year, the World Health Assembly voted for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. At the time, there were 125 countries with endemic polio. [4] Efforts were built upon those used to control wild poliovirus in the Americas in the early 1980s, and on lessons from smallpox eradication. [1] Its first coordinator was Nick Ward. [5]
The polio vaccine has all but obliterated the illness that once killed thousands and paralyzed 15,000 people nationwide every year. ... according to the Global Polio Eradication ... 4–6 years ...
In 2000, polio was declared to have been officially eliminated in 37 Western Pacific countries, including China and Australia. [132] [133] Despite eradication ten years earlier, an outbreak was confirmed in China in September 2011, involving a strain common in Pakistan. [134]
Despite eradication in recent years, the polio virus is a deadly illness which wreaked havoc in the UK in the 1950s. Scientists have now discovered polio in several sewage samples collected from ...