Polio in force in four countries

• May 3, 2024

At present, twenty million people are paralyzed as a result of this terrible virus. And although there are fewer and fewer victims of polio - since 1988 they have decreased by more than 99 percent in the world - but it is still present in four countries.

In 1988 the Initiative for the Global Eradication of Poliomyelitis was promoted and it was estimated that, at that time, there were 350,000 cases on the planet. As a result of this campaign headed by the World Health Organization (WHO), for 2006 only 1,997 outbreaks had been notified.

This reduction is, without a doubt, a success. However, not all is good news: according to 2008 reports, poliomyelitis remains endemic in four countries, mainly in northern India, northern Nigeria and the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

These are places of great economic poverty where there have been few efforts to eradicate this disease, which mainly affects children under five years of age.

Vaccination, only option

Poliomyelitis has no cure, it can only be prevented. The polio vaccine, administered repeatedly, gives infants lifelong protection. In 2007, more than 400 million children were immunized in 27 countries.

According to the international organization, one in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis (usually of the legs), and 5 to 10 percent of people with paralysis die as a result of inactivity of the respiratory muscles.

The wild virus stored in Latin America

In 1994, all Latin American countries, thanks to vaccination campaigns, managed to eradicate polio from the region and prevent thousands of deaths or paralysis caused by the disease, especially among children.

However, the virus still exists in laboratories and its storage represents a threat to the definitive eradication of this disease. To verify that the wild polio virus is adequately contained and safe, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) created a commission that presented its results in early 2010.

According to the research that analyzed the situation in almost 60 thousand laboratories in 42 countries, only Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States reported having wild viruses or infectious material stored in 246 laboratories; while in Colombia, Cuba and Panama, among the 33 countries that do not have the virus, it has already been destroyed.

In the words of Carlyle Guerra, president of the Regional Polio Containment Commission of PAHO, "in the Americas the wild polio virus has not circulated for 19 years, the last case was in Peru, but we have to continue monitoring. The virus exists in laboratories and can escape if there are no adequate security conditions. "