The Academy newsletter recently included a publication speaking to the importance of vaccination to eliminate infectious diseases as well as the report that polio was very close to its eradication. But what happened? The war in Pakistan and Afghanistan halted vaccination campaigns, and the virus took the opportunity to continue its spread, arriving in the UK and the United States.

As this article in the New England Journal of Medicine states, “The United States and the United Kingdom are now experiencing outbreaks of imported poliovirus similar to those that dozens of other countries have seen over the past 6 years, and for the same reason: under-vaccination. In the United States, the indigenous wild polioviruses (WPVs) had most likely been eliminated by the early 1970s, if not earlier, thanks to rapid improvement in vaccine coverage with the attenuated oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV). Because OPV is a live RNA virus, it is genetically unstable and, in rare instances, can cause paralytic disease. In the United States, there were approximately 6 to 10 such cases per year. We had thus eliminated disease from WPV, but not all disease from poliovirus. For this reason, the United States switched from OPV to the safe and effective inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), after which vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP) attributable to OPV use disappeared in this country. Both the United States and the entire region of the Americas were declared free of indigenous WPV in 1994; the United Kingdom, Israel, and the European region followed in 2002…….. Continued support for the successful completion of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative is critical to eliminating the threat of any live poliovirus. Most of the world has been successful on this front. The challenge now is to stop all transmission and outbreaks to achieve global polio eradication. The absence of high vaccination coverage anywhere poses a risk everywhere.”1

You can read the full text here.

References

  1. Pallansch, M. A. (2022). Circulating Poliovirus in New York — New Instance of an Old Problem. New England Journal of Medicine, 387(19), 1725–1728. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp2212115

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